July 30, 2013

Heart and brains

My youngest son leaves at the end of the week to move into his off-campus apartment a week or so before his fall semester. He will be a sophomore at Indiana University. It has been great having here this summer, even though our schedules have not crossed as much as I would like. He has worked a lot of hours and spends the evenings and late nights he is not working with his friends, while I tend to rise early and go to bed at an hour that would be early to him.  That is exactly the way it should be.

During the course of the summer we have had some great discussions on the events of the day. It is interesting to see his intellectual struggles to make sense of the greater world around him. His debate positions have a distinct liberal positioning, but his conservative upbringing wars mightily in his head. The result is a very Libertarian point of view in most cases.

His usual opening position on a given topic is from a more progressive point of view, but he has developed a deep mistrust of government in general, so often he ends at the right conclusion, just by a different mental path than I would take.  Time will tell if three more years of professorial brainwashing will overcome the nearly twenty years of good sense instilled by his mother and I.

As I mentally and verbally spar with him, Churchill's legendary comment regarding liberals and conservatives often comes to mind.

1 comment:

Dan O. said...

My son, in his teens (late 90's - early 2000's) was a Bush-hating seemingly average lib-leaning teen. I let him go on, only giving him one sentence of advice. "You need to start getting your news/politics from sources other than Rolling Stone & MTV."

Now in his late 20's, he is hardcore conservative and I love him for it.

He loves riling up all the lib FB friends he has by posting anti-Obama/Liberal content.

The smart ones come around in due time, Joe.

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