I can pinpoint the moment when I became “politically conscious”.

I use the term “conscious” as opposed to “sensitive” here; I became politically sensitive at 15; my freshman year in a Catholoic parochial high school. It was 1987; U2 was in, the Beatles were making a big comeback amongst the “granola youth” movement, and presumably, sales of ladies razors had begun to plummet once more. I can’t articulate to you now why I rebelled against this; I can simply say that the dress, manner and attitude of many of the “crunchies” caused a typical welling of teenage angst and revulsion to well up within me at the sight of them, or the sound of their pious proletarian mouthings.

I promptly sewed a large Metallica patch on my coat, and proceeded to alienate three-quarters of the school. I suppose, at this time, I actually set my feet on the road to political conservatism. My political consciousness, however, was to truly awaken the following year, in a sophomore biology class.

Now, by this time, I’d left the parochial school I’d attended (I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d alienated three-fourths of the school) to attend the local public high school. They’d hired a new teacher for the “college prep” level of soph bio at that time; a ‘woman’ right out of college, and likely, right off the front lines of a NARAL rally - complete with peasant skirt and sasquatch legs (I kid you not; these gams would’ve made the Wolfman blush).

In what I then regarded as “typical granola fashion”, she rarely exerted anything approaching control over the class, instead trying to build some sort of “peer-relationship” between herself and the students. For our part, we reacted as even the “smart” school kids would - we mocked her personal hygeine, chatted each other up during lectures, and referred to her as “Jenny”.

Jenny, being the good little activist that she was, decided that an in-class debate over a current ecological issue would be a good opportunity to indoctrinate the class a bit. The issue in question? The U.S. Air Force’s plan to test laser-guided ordinance over unpopulated central and northern Maine forests. Of course, this issue tickled two liberal pet peeves: the military, which they hate, and the cuddly forest creatures, which they love. Jenny asked for volunteers to plan to debate the anti-testing side of the argument; many hands went up. Jenny proceeded to select the most pious leftist in the class for this assignment; a noted, budding libfem (note: labelling others is fun) who would, two years later, go on to have an enormous mouth in our senior Government class and become the object of much ridicule.

When Jenny asked for volunteers to debate the pro-testing side of the debate, only a few hands shot up - one of which was mine. I was chosen to take on that argument, and the debate was slated for the end of the school week.

Now, why I took that side of the argument, I couldn’t say. In all honesty, my unthinking sympathy was initially on the side of the cuddly bears and squirrels who would be placed in harms’ way by military ordinance streaking into their habitat at many hundreds of miles an hour. Even with no warheads on these missiles, as I learned would be the case, the thought of Bambi casually going about his evening only to get wtfpwnd by an incoming sidewinder was, shall we say, unpalatable.

However, I had an assignment to do. I’d probably taken it, truth be told, just to try to rub some tree-hugger’s face in shit, as likely as not. So, I was going to have to find a way to debate and win.

Then, a funny thing happened on the way to Friday afternoon: For the first time in my memory, I turned an issue over and looked at the ramifications of the other side of an argument. Of course, at the time, the significance of that event struck me not at all. Looking back, though, I think that’s when I learned to be a critical thinker. Someone who could sift through fact and opinion to form a logical argument, as opposed to simply having a visceral, reactionary, childish opinion of everything that happened in the world around me.

I gathered my facts. I began to re-think my own idealogy, and prepare to present this to a classful of kids. I attempted to think a step ahead of my opponent; to prepare counter-arguments for what I was likely to face. My empathy with the “other side”, and my insight into their arguments allowed me to accomplish this with what ended up being relative ease.

I’ve used the same strategy ever since, and it’s never let me down.

In the end, it was almost comically easy. Jenny moderated the debate; the anti-testing side was allowed to open. To my recollection, it went something like this:

“Like, Bono says that we should, like, live in peace and harmony with the earth, and the army wants to, like, blow it up. We don’t need to test any more nuclear weapons, because, like, we already have enough to blow up the whole world ten times over, and killing defensless animals is evil.”

Ok, ok. I just made that up. I assure you, however, that what she tossed up as an “argument” was equally softballish. Then, I proceeded to hit a home run on her face.

In the end, it was determined that a vote by show-of-hand would determine the winner. Two hands went up for my punch-drunk, flustered opponent. I had won the rest of the class, much to Jenny’s obvious chagrin.

No more debates were scheduled for the year.

I can’t elaborate any more than that on how the “debate” went, specifically; this was almost two decades ago, now. I remember the feelings I had, though: the sense of rightness I’d come to have about my position; the satisfaction of thoroughly dismantling and annihilating a person’s position piece-by-logical-piece. The look on libfem’s face as she realized how badly she’d gotten her shit wrecked. It was an experience, juvenile though it was, that would set my feet on the political and philosophical roads I now follow.

All from a high school biology class. Go figure.