9 - The Age of Enlightenment

Summary

“I'm a little country mouse, come to the city” is the first line of a little song my mom used to sing, and this silly child's ditty kept running through my head during the first few days I was in Seattle preparing to enroll in graduate school.

“Everything looks to me to be quite pretty,” it went on. “I hope I don't run into a great big kitty, 'cause if I did, he'd eat me up, and that would be a pity.”

No ravenous Washington State tomcat ate me up, but this cross-country move from Orlando to Seattle, an obvious quantum geographical leap, turned out to be as intellectually life-changing for me as any event before or since. My entire set of political and philosophical ideas and beliefs was to be rapidly and permanently altered because of the new life that lay in store for me. This little country mouse changed from a socially conservative, Republican, Christian child of Dixie into a politically liberal, socially accepting, card-carrying member of the ACLU. Indeed, I was so changed that my name even appeared a couple of years later as a plaintiff on a Supreme Court case that dealt with the constitutionality of requiring loyalty oaths to be signed by all employees of the university.

It may not be exactly correct to say that I made enormous changes in my philosophical and political opinions. Rather, it may just have been that this was the first time in my life that I gave any serious thought at all to such matters.