Three days into the month, and I’m batting 1.000! With February being the shortest month, I figured it would be a great time to try and write a little each day in an attempt to get back into the swing of writing, something I used to do for money, as well as for fun. After touching on the world of finance yesterday, I’ll go back into politics, but not really about what is currently going on, but maybe how I got here and how my personal politics were shaped.

I’ve touched on this in a previous post, but that was written during the election and concerning who my late father would have voted for during the most recent election cycle. It would be wrong to say that my father’s politics didn’t influence my current political views; if anything, they might have actually helped reinforce them in a way. But it wasn’t until I left my home state at the age of 20 for the liberal Northeast that my political identity truly took shape.

I was born — and have spent — about three quarters of my life in the deep red state of Utah. I was “born into covenant” as they say around here, the third child of older parents who, at the time, were living in a small town called Orem. My parents, who were both raised in Southern California (though my dad was born in Sioux city, Iowa), had settled in Utah in the mid-1970s after my dad had left a once-promising military career a bit earlier than anticipated. My parents had both gone to Brigham Young University in the ’60s, with my dad graduating in 1965 or so and joining the Army. So that, and the proximity to family, led them to settle in Happy Valley. Continue reading “Young Republican into Grumpy Democrat” →