It was 10 years ago last week that the Dixie Chicks made their now-infamous statement in a London concert that they were embarrassed to be from the same state as George W. Bush. Conservatives went nuts. They started burning the Dixie Chicks album, the group never fully recovered, and now likely will never produce another album.
In retrospect I suppose that this was about the time that I was starting to wake up after my years of conservatism. I had been a Rush Limbaugh-listening member of that group for a number of years. While I don't ever remember feeling quite the vitriol that some felt about liberalism, Bill Clinton, and the rest of the world, I can remember thinking Clinton ought to be impeached, liberals weren't quite patriotic enough, and that we as America had the right to rule the world, since we, of course, were better and more moral than anybody else.
Yet at some point, about the time I was also starting to pay attention to soccer (some would say the two were related, that moral degeneracy comes due to that wicked sport), I began to see that there were a lot problems with conservatism. I began to see the hypocrisy of it all...they demanded freedom for people to do all sorts of things, yet denied people other kinds of freedoms that they didn't approve of. "Compassionate conservatism" could only be pushed so far as it got to the wealthy's pockets, and then it came to an laughable end. I became amazed with their continual griping that their views were not being reflected in the 'lamestream media', but then they would quote anything Fox News or Glenn Beck said as gospel truth. And maybe most of all, I began to see that the things they thought were vitally important as American values were not necessarily (and usually not at all) Christian or Biblical values.
Who knows how many things pushed me along the road to suspicion. But I do remember that the whole hullabaloo of the Dixie Chicks contributed to it. I was amazed that people who decried the totalitarianism of other nations couldn't stand any free speech or dissent from popular opinion here. Remember, W was still riding high here. Not only had he looked like the big man standing at ground zero a year and a half earlier, but his two wars were extremely popular: we wanted some Muslim blood, and we wanted it now. It was still unpopular to say that he was wrong, even if the rest of the world believed it. It began to dawn on me that people who can't handle hearing criticism need to be criticized all the more: what were they really hiding? More reflection and thought over the years since made me feel as I continue to do now, that conservatism as it has become is full of crap. It's a tightly controlled ideology of the wealth class with no real concern for genuine Christian values.
Someday I'll look back on other landmarks which took me in other directions. But it's interesting to look back and see where I've come from.
