Consider this

As a child, I hated conflict and the way I reacted to it. I shuddered at the angry edge of a shout or cry and sank silently away, withdrew into myself, searching, I suppose, for a quiet place inside where my pounding heart would slow, the red in my burning face fade, and the anxious sweating stop. It’s not that the people I grew up around often raised their voices at one another or at me. Mom usually responded to hurt, disagreement, or anger with tight-lipped silence. Dad, especially if he’d been drinking, brooded under a dark cloud before dozing off where he sat at the end of the kitchen table. But when someone scolded or wronged me or yelled angrily, I felt the sudden welling up of tears.

I was the middle child of four siblings: a sister and three brothers. During the first ten years of my life, we lived eleven miles from Sleepy Eye on a farm that Dad rented on shares. The old two-story house had no running water, no bathroom or shower, no phone, no carpet, no furnace. We had an outhouse, two oil burners for heat — one in the kitchen and another in the living room, a small stonewalled cellar beneath a door lifted out of the pantry floor, a cistern on the west side of the house, and a pump halfway to the barn where we drew water and carried it in for cooking, washing dishes, and bathing. We rarely had new clothes; instead, Mom darned Dad’s socks, patched the threadbare knees of our jeans, let down the hem on pants legs when they got too short, and often bought what we needed at a secondhand store in Sleepy Eye.

This was the ’60s in rural Minnesota, and while it sounds rustic and maybe even primitive compared to homes and life today, it’s just the way it was. As a child, I felt no need to question or complain about our circumstances. I played outside with my brothers, liked going to school, had plenty to eat, looked forward to my birthday and Christmas, and had a mostly happy childhood.

But recently I’ve wondered how, despite having lived most of my life in rural and small-town locales, nearly all of which were very (even fanatically) conservative, I developed my liberal attitudes and beliefs and why I’ve retained them for decades. It’s a practical question, one worth asking regardless of our political affiliations, especially in our current atmosphere of rancorous politicking.

Maybe this: one warm fall afternoon when I was five or six years old, my brother Ken and I sat with our legs folded under us in a sunny corner of the lawn where the wind had swept leaves into a small heap of crisp colors against the rolltop fence surrounding the house. We burrowed our small bare hands into the pile and discovered at the bottom damp leaves matted against the grass and dirt. When those near my knees inexplicably moved, my eyes got wide, and we both scrambled back. Out crept something I’d never seen before — a shiny black salamander with short squat legs and yellow spots starting near its front shoulders and scattered down its smooth fleshy back and tail. Rather than jabbing it with a stick or kicking it back under the pile, I watched it as it undoubtedly watched us.

It was as if nature had suddenly revealed one of its secrets in a world filled with things I or any child might discover — things and ideas and people that make it rich and endlessly interesting — if only I were curious enough to pay attention. But genuine curiosity occurs only when we forget ourselves, when we don’t just look at but actually see with interest, acceptance, and appreciation that the other — in all their complexity and beauty, defects and differences —have a rightful and necessary place in this world. For most children, this comes naturally. However, as we grow up, we become more self-conscious, more self-absorbed, and more susceptible to the influence of those around us.

Or maybe this: in November 1960, Dad voted for the first time and after the election pulled off the cover of Life magazine with its color photograph of President Kennedy and clothes-pinned it next to my sister’s and older brother’s best school papers on the cord strung along the upstairs hallway. On a Friday afternoon three years later, as I sat listening to Mrs. Beltz, our first-grade teacher, read to us, the intercom on the wall above the blackboard behind her buzzed and crackled. She stopped, likely expecting some mundane reminder about the bus schedule or an after-school meeting. But then the staticky voice of the superintendent announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Mrs. Beltz may have gasped, but in my memory her face barely changed, probably so as not to frighten us. For years after that, Dad refused to vote again, saying that “they shot the one president I voted for.”

I suppose seeing the effect of the assassination on people I knew and watching on our black-and-white TV JFK’s funeral procession and, in 1968 when I was ten, the aftermath of the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., all marked me in some way. And though life on the farm didn’t change much, the world I glimpsed on television was changing rapidly and often violently: demonstrations in U.S. cities that turned into riots, buildings in flames, storefront windows shattered, helmeted police with German shepherds straining at their leashes, battered and bloodied bodies in Selma and Watts, Ohio and Mississippi, Washington and Hanoi. It seemed these events had nothing to do with curiosity and everything to do with denying people, especially the poor and powerless and those who often looked very different from me, their fair and rightful place in the world.

As a child, I despised unfairness, not only when I felt I’d been wronged but also when I saw others treated unfairly. This was often the root of the childhood disputes that arose when someone broke the rules of a playground game or cheated to gain a selfish advantage. Then, the shouted accusation that all children understood and most submitted to was this: “That’s not fair!” Though we all knew what being fair or playing fair meant, some, as they became teens and young adults, decided otherwise, took advantage of others, and prioritized winning and their own self-interests over fairness and the common good.

And probably this: on a windy, raw March evening in 1975, I was walking from the State Capitol in St. Paul, where, during a two-week high school program, I served as a page on the floor of the House of Representatives. The street was quiet, and lights overhead glowed in puddles on the asphalt. As I crossed to the front door of the YMCA, where I stayed in a small room, two Native American men approached me and asked if I might give them some money for bread and lunch meat for themselves and the others; the older of the two pointed down the street at a group of Native men, women, and children trudging toward the river. I was a high school junior and had very little cash on me; the money I had saved for this trip I’d left in my room upstairs for safekeeping. However, I took my wallet from my back pocket and handed him what I had: a five-dollar bill. They thanked me, turned, and followed the others down the darkening street. I watched them as they left, curious what brought them here, why our paths crossed, and if they had no choice but to spend the night huddled together under a bridge or overpass.

Here the strata of society and all the unfairness it implied were laid bare before me. In the House chamber? Primarily white men wearing suits and ties and deciding the rules for how the rest of us should live. On the dark street leading to the river? The descendants of the original inhabitants of this land, now homeless, destitute, and seemingly abandoned. And at the front door of the YMCA? A naïve teenager with few resources but who was offered opportunities that suggested the possibility of a life far from the farm, the outhouse, the secondhand clothes.

The value I place on curiosity, kindness, and fairness has changed little over the decades since then. The way I was raised and what I experienced when I was young certainly pushed me in this direction. But maybe I was also predisposed to these attitudes by my personality. And almost certainly I later made conscious decisions based on what I learned while raising my daughter and now on what I hope for my granddaughter.

So as we make decisions that affect not only us and those we most care about but also all the others who have the right to a life of their choice, let us not forget them or ignore the crucial questions of our time:

Why prioritize self-interest over the common good?

Why replace curiosity with the blinders of suspicion and fear?

Why choose cynicism over optimism, prejudice over tolerance, greed over generosity?

Why invest in falsehoods rather than truth and in cruelty rather than compassion?

Why willingly deny ourselves and others our individual autonomy?

And why ignore the explicit threats of a vain, vengeful autocrat who threatens and degrades, instigates conflict, and appeals to our basest, foulest instincts?

We know better. We can dream better. And we must be and do better.