If liberals at UCLA had been this reasonable I don't know that I would have ever realized I was a conservative Republican at all. After all I was raised in one of the bluest counties in the nation and sent to public school all my life. Many of my highschool teachers attended woodstock. I was taught Republicans were evil, Reagan was a failure and the Cold War? What Cold War? When I scored "moderately conservative" on my political spectrum test in my senior year government class I was horrified and confused. Me? Conservative? But being conservative's not cool!

But at UCLA they were so completely unreasonable, irrational, and just plain mean that I stopped really being able to see and understand their point of view. I rarely got any reasonable, thoughtful arguments, but rather was lambasted with ad hominem attacks merely for expressing a different point of view. During the Iraq War, when my boyfriend-at-the-time was a grunt in Iraq, I had one fellow student tell me that the war would be a quagmire and the only way my boyfriend would be coming home anytime soon would be if he was in a body bag. Nice. Another guy (who admitted he knew no one in the military) spent several hours trying to convince me that the military doesn't care when soldiers and marines die in friendly-fire incidents and would NOT listen to any of my explanations as to why his arguments didn't make sense at a basic level (Wouldn't the military care even if it's only because we don't have a huge military to begin with and the country has a hefty chunk of money invested in each of our troops? And that's setting aside the fact that they are personally responsible as leaders for those troops and therefore just might actually feel something when troops die since military commanders are not heartless beasts of war no matter what liberals think of them).

Between that and the whole butterfly ballot, hanging chad crap that happened during my freshman year, by my senior year in college I was ready to declare myself a Republican. And after I did that I became even more convinced that I did the right thing when the Bruin Republican chairman was spit on and robbed after a meeting one day. Or how about being called a "race-traitor" by a random person walking by our fight affirmative-action table? Or how about that same day when a guy called one of the Jewish BR's (he was wearing a yarmulke) a "Nazi." Um...oookay.

So yeah, I never thought I would think something from France is better than something from America, but it's true, French hippies are way more fun to talk to than American hippies.