Bookworm, dreamer, artist, raised in a tolerant household, English degree… I barely even had the accent. I considered myself more liberal than most everyone I knew. So why was I a Republican for over 20 years? I’ll tell you why.

Because inside every well-read country boy is a wannabe city boy who’s afraid he isn’t good enough.

If you judge good enough by ability to afford a comfortable and cultured city life, I kind of wasn’t. I finally made it at least temporarily, after hopscotching from one low-paying small town newspaper gig to another for 20 years until I met city girl with a better-paying job than mine.

The city was my measure of normal. It was how they showed it in the movies. And the little town I grew up in was not enough for me. Plenty of fun, plenty of nature and plenty of hell to raise, but there was no future for me, not a good one anyway.

I thought myself a cut above “regular” country boys because look how they were portrayed in movies and on TV my whole life. And how much of an ignorant and racist person I would be if I identified at all with the tribe my people came from.

I loved rock ‘n’ roll and made a point of avoiding country music. If Satanic Panicking preachers hated it, I was into it. I was jealous of hippies for getting to see Hendrix and getting to be rebels who made a difference.

So of course I became a conservative at the first opportunity, not that I understood what that meant. Kids in the country are like tadpoles, liberal and conservative larvae. They might turn out to be a frog or a salamander. You can’t tell until they grew up or at least until after their first existential crisis.

All Rush Limbaugh had to do was tell us Democrats referred to us as “flyover country” and he made me a fan for years. You listen to the people you identify with.

By the time the Republicans got to be the way they are now I had had enough. I was tired of the crooked preachers, the Iraq War, “trickle down” economics.

It’s why although I oppose what they say and believe, I have some sympathy for MAGA, for the Red Pillers, for the Incels, for the Fox News and Joe Rogan stans. It’s why I felt bad for the Katie McHugh, the Breitbart reporter who got thrown under the bus by those who radicalized her.

I was unpersuaded by most of those influences, but I was privileged. Privileged to have parents who taught me to love reading, who were more tolerant than most. Privileged because my family was able to send me to college, barely.

I was lucky enough to discover the Internet at a time when it could expose me to a variety of viewpoints, instead of algorithmically channeling me to the extreme edges of what I already believed.

I was privileged to be part of Generation Jones (one reason for the Late Boomer moniker). Old enough but not too old. If I’d been in school during the Cuban Missile Crisis or raised on the Internet, I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t be just like them today.