True Believers

The book "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer should be read by everyone at least once in their life. Hoffer, a longshoreman, wrote incredibly on mass movements and the type of people who join them. 

My first encounter with a "true believer" (though I didn't know it at the time) was in eighth grade, when the class had to vote for Bush or Dukakis. We were assigned homework as to why we would vote for one of them. The assignment was to tell us why we were to vote for one of them in a paragraph or less.   

The mother of one of my classmates wrote a three page (literally)  dissertation on how she could "never vote for someone who doesn't help the unborn". Her kid chose option C, none of the above. It's cute, but also completely out of touch with the real world. 

Even as a child, I was pretentious and obnoxious. When I tried to tell him that it would be better to vote for the lesser evil (it is, welcome to reality) he also went off on me. 

This isn't about abortion, it's about true believers. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said, "A frantic orthodoxy is rooted not in faith, but in doubt. It's when you are not sure that you are quite sure." 

He was right, as he was often.