The Day I Stopped Being a Liberal
Yes. Can you believe it? I was a bleeding-heart liberal once—full stop, no apologies.
In my late 20s, convinced I could save the world one hug at a time. Dreaming about how I would rescue the "poor black kids" trapped in the projects near our church. As a volunteer with the youth group, I'd pile a bunch of them into my minivan—which I'd bought just to work with these kids—every week. Wide-eyed kids from broken homes, I hauled them over for Bible study, games, and snacks. Pure compassion, right? Handouts, empathy, endless "understanding." We were the heroes, lifting them up from the ghetto's grip—or so I thought. But it was all built upon that insidious, "soft bigotry of low expectations"—treating them as fragile and incapable.
Reality has a way of swinging a haymaker, though, and it hit me on a chaotic Wednesday night. The room was buzzing with kids stealing snacks from each other, little acts of chaos excused as "just kids being kids." Zero accountability—just more soft words and head pats. Then it boiled over: a black boy, hauled off and punched a white girl—a church member's daughter who was a very sweet kid—square in the face. Blood on her lip, shock in her eyes, and the whole group froze. But not me.
Instincts kicked in like a thunderclap. I grabbed him by the arm, yanked him out of the room into the hallway, and let loose: "What is wrong with you?! You can't punch girls!!!" No filters, no pity party. In that raw, electric second, my worldview shattered. I stopped seeing him as a "poor kid from the hood"—a perpetual victim to be coddled—and started treating him like anyone else: a person. With the same expectations, the same accountability, the same demand to do better. My transformation was instant. I became like "The Teacher," Anne Sullivan, who didn't baby Helen Keller but broke through her isolation by insisting on more—not less.
That moment didn't just change me; it changed him, too. My new stance flipped a switch in him. He rose to my expectations. Yes, the trouble-making bully who terrorized the group overnight morphed into a fairly well-behaved kid. By treating him with enough dignity to know he could do better he was brought to life. My discipline demonstrated my love for him, and it was what he had needed all along. It's what we both needed.
In the end, I did help a "poor kid from the ghetto." I did it not by pitying him—but by expecting him to behave like a young man. Turns out, that's the kind of compassion that's effective. As someone once said, "A conservative is a liberal mugged by reality." That was true for me. I stopped being a Liberal that night, and ironically, that's when I started truly loving people.
(This happened many years ago, long before
@joe_rigney and
@conservmillen wrote on the subject of empathy gone wrong, but if you haven't read their books, do so)