I attended Boston University and graduated in 2001. For two years, my roommate was a self-proclaimed conservative. He was not registered with either of our wretched political parties. He wrote in John McCain on his 2000 presidential ballot, and he now attends Harvard Law School. He also happens to be pretty brilliant. He does not “love his country like a four-year-old loves his mommy.” I’m sure the same might be said of political columnists like Charles Krauthammer or Andrew Sullivan or William F. Buckley or, if it’ll get a rise out of the likes of Al Franken, myself. I have never called myself a conservative. In fact, I’ve more commonly called myself or thought of myself as a liberal.
But if it’s Zach Miller’s brand of “liberalism” (an increasingly common perception of the word from both those who call themselves such and those who use liberal like a curse word) that I have to ally myself with, well then, no thank you (“Warped ideas and a skewed sense of patriotism,” Dec. 3, pg. 7). When your mind can only go one way and anything that even mildly disagrees with your political stance drives you to want to “scream” and forces you to call anyone who disagrees with you even mildly an “idiot,” you’ve stopped thinking, and you’ve just started following, making you no better than the people you call “idiots.”
Timothy Aaron COM ’01
