I guess I’m curious what “enlightenment” you felt you got out of it.
I met people from a variety of backgrounds, including people who’d grown up overseas. I had roommates for the first time, which gave me a taste of living with others who didn’t share my same habits or hygiene. I started dating seriously for the first time. Experimented with alcohol and a few other substances. A bunch of friends came out of the closet. I spent every summer doing a different low wage job - grocery store, teacher, assembly line worker, entry level paid worker on a political campaign. Put more miles behind the wheel in my freshman year than my entire life previously. Got to watch a particle accelerator fire and buy a homeless guy a drink at a local bar.
Idk how to really nail it down in simple terms, but I had such a broader exposure to the rest of the world in those university years.
Agreed but I get annoyed at people who have this idea of if we just educate everyone -> utopia and that conservatism is a function of undereducation
Oh, I agree. Some of the worst reactionaries are college educated. I don’t think college makes you liberal.
What’s the old saying? “A Conservative is just a Liberal that’s been mugged by reality”?
I had more than a few diehard Republicans in my friend group in college. Like, I got to meet the kind of people you just see shit talking on CrossFire IRL. People who unironically thought we should do genocide in Iraq because these were subhumans who had forfeited their right to life. People who were in Engineering because they wanted to build the bombs we were dropping in Afghanistan. People who used the hard-r at the end of the n-word just to prove they could.
I met people from a variety of backgrounds, including people who’d grown up overseas. I had roommates for the first time, which gave me a taste of living with others who didn’t share my same habits or hygiene. I started dating seriously for the first time. Experimented with alcohol and a few other substances. A bunch of friends came out of the closet. I spent every summer doing a different low wage job - grocery store, teacher, assembly line worker, entry level paid worker on a political campaign. Put more miles behind the wheel in my freshman year than my entire life previously. Got to watch a particle accelerator fire and buy a homeless guy a drink at a local bar.
Idk how to really nail it down in simple terms, but I had such a broader exposure to the rest of the world in those university years.
Oh, I agree. Some of the worst reactionaries are college educated. I don’t think college makes you liberal.
What’s the old saying? “A Conservative is just a Liberal that’s been mugged by reality”?
I had more than a few diehard Republicans in my friend group in college. Like, I got to meet the kind of people you just see shit talking on CrossFire IRL. People who unironically thought we should do genocide in Iraq because these were subhumans who had forfeited their right to life. People who were in Engineering because they wanted to build the bombs we were dropping in Afghanistan. People who used the hard-r at the end of the n-word just to prove they could.
Also incredibly enlightening.