I love liberals

Sometimes, I hate being a conservative. Well, I don't really hate being conservative because I think conservatism makes sense, and I like to make sense.

On the other hand, there are the imminently fun, clever and wacky people I associate with, hang out with (and once in a blue moon fall in love with) who are about as different from me politically/religiously as peanut butter is different than wasabi. And I wonder, as I sip my Starbucks in my tie-dyed shirt and Birkenstocks, am I in the wrong tribe?

I once told my mother that if I'd been alive during the '60s, I woulda been an anti-war protester. Okay ... you say those sort of things when you're in college. But I probably would have because while I was in college, I was trying desperately to be a liberal, which is to say I was an idealist trying to embrace what seemed the embodiement of idealism. However, I was trying to be a liberal at a Baptist university, which is not very liberal at all. I might have been liberal for Bob Jones University, but definitely not for Harvard.

So I kept the tie-dye and the Starbucks addiction -- and the idealism -- but realized I just couldn't intellectually embrace liberalism as it is today, nor could I entirely jettison the evangelicalism I was steeped in, although I've traded in Southern Baptist-ness for high-church Anglicanism. Somewhere, idealism had to fit into the real world, which in my view has a few immutable truths that liberalism attempts an end-run on. On the other hand, liberals seem to make most of the best music, films and art, and I'm an artist, so I'm constantly the odd woman out in many of my circles. Good grief, I'm a GOP bellydancer. How many of THOSE do you find on the planet?

I love my lib friends. In fact, it's uncanny how often I'll really dig a person ... then find out they're a lib. Idealistic people are the ones unafraid to try new things because what is possibility for others is glittering reality within the horizons of their own minds. (I'm not sure that sentence entirely made sense.) Therefore, libs, who I find unswervingly idealistic, may break boundaries that make us conservatives uncomfortable, but on the other hand, sometimes the apple cart needs upsetting.

I keep a quiet understanding with my liberal friends that we just won't talk about certain things. In the meanwhile, yes, I'd be happy as a friggin' clam to attend your movie premiere or your cultural festival or your fabu party that includes half the gay population of Birmingham.

Just don't ask me to vote for Hillary -- please.