I love politics. I've followed it religiously ever since the age of 12, when I stumbled upon a YouTube video of Michael Knowles trying to guess the company behind the woke commercial (he still does those today, and they remain the best). However, I am still aware that my being a teenager, means that I am nowhere near a philosophy I would be able to ascribe to for the rest of my life. While I am most certain I will not end up a blue-haired vegan leftist, my ideology in as little as a year will be vastly different from the one I believe in now.
As much as I love breaking down new laws, or pointing out cultural patterns, I decided to go with a different theme. As a teen, people don’t think I have my mind made up when I talk. And they’re right. I’m not sure that tomorrow, I will stand by what I have written today, but that’s what the political scene needs anyway. I’m suspicious of anyone, young people especially, who claim their ideology has only diminutively, or never at all changed. Evolution in one’s ideology is important, as it not only reminds us of the existence of the human condition, but shows a man’s commitment to finding the truth.
In my observations so far, the most trustworthy people in life are those who admit their shortcomings and are not afraid of changing their mind. Essentially, they are honest with themselves, and the nature of their relationship with the world, allowing them to see the issues of today with a certain sense of clarity. Not to be confused with moral relativists those who seem truly “enlightened” seem to achieve their goals when they have reached the point of being able to claim that they will never 100% know “why” at the end of the day, which is why I am also suspicious of the people who seem to have a serious, yes-or-no answer for everything.
Even at the cost of sounding cliche, it’s important to test what we know, as everybody struggles with something. For me personally, it’s the issue of gay adoption. If one were to come up to me and ask me “should gay couples be able to adopt?”, I would only be able to reply “I don’t know”. When considering that “gay marriage” is currently written into law, in most cases, deliberation would not be needed due to the fact that heterosexual couples vastly outnumber the number of homosexual couples. On the contrary, if a child, in a certain situation, was living in an unhealthy facility, and absolutely no straight couples were interested in adopting him, it seems like not only an acceptable decision, but one which should be encouraged. Undoubtedly, there could be rare cases where the welfare of a child would be overlooked due to a law completely banning same-sex adoption. One popular contemporary issue many teeter on both sides of is the legality, and therefore, morality of IVF, but one can go as deep and pondering the existence of God and divinity of Christ, as Jordan Peterson famously does as well. By His grace, I believe I have been fortunate enough to be “further along” in developing the overall worldview that I will follow for the rest of my life than most others in my age range, as religion greatly assists in building a cohesive philosophy.
Donald Rumsfeld, former Bush Secretary of Defense stipulates, “There are known knowns ...There are known unknowns …But there are also unknown unknowns.” I know that I do not know, which, in addition to serving as a documentation of my beliefs as a teenager, is the point of this piece. I do not know where I will be in twenty years, ten years, or even tomorrow, because I have made a lifelong commitment to changing my mind. With every person I speak to, book I read, video I watch, and experience I have, I will learn something new. This ability does not lie exclusively with me. This is supposed to happen with everyone. The United States of America was not built on making bad ideologies sound desirable to excitable people and censoring contrarian views, like countries such as the USSR and Communist China were. Rather, it was founded on exploration, human progress, and God’s honest truth by enlightened men determined to know all they could in order to create a great nation.
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