Thomas Wolfe Was Only Half Right

I just got back from my hometown. When you haven't been home for 16 years, and you're the least bit introspective, you expect various and sundry epiphanic moments. The problem with expecting them is that they are predetermined to a degree, and influenced by years of gathering nostalgia, and nostalgia is notorious for it's sepia saturation filter. The traumatic times aren't forgotten, but they are appropriated to your attempts to make sense of your life, a tone or direction to the narrative of you.
So intellectual, emotional honesty can be elusive, or at least, if, as I said, you are the least bit, or as in my case, overly introspective.
But Duncan, Oklahoma is, naturally smaller, and also flatter than I remember.
Hills as landmarks was a sometimes misleading method of navigation.
My memory seemed to adopt the same effect as binoculars, as when you raise the glasses to your eyes to examine a distant hill and find it dramatically steeper.
This is disappointing.
It also makes me wonder what a West Kansan prodigal experiences upon his arrival back home.
That particular area of Oklahoma, though, is unique. In fact, you leave the exact terrain and flora to which I refer by traveling 30 miles in any direction. The post and blackjack oaks that I knew were small even as a boy seem to lose their stark  peculiarity toward Lawton, or Texas.
The hills are the same. They seem deliberately miniaturized, like a 1:2 scale model of the greater Great Plains.
I did some walking in the fields, remembering sharp smells of weeds and soil. In vain I looked for the specific weed that often held a small ball of foam in the crook of trunk and branch that was home to an even smaller caterpillar. I remembered trying to duplicate this phenomenon by spitting on many a weed, only to see it drip away, revealing no caterpillar.
I heard bluejays and crows predominate the fowl of the air. Wished it was night long ago before the whippoorwills vanished, leaving a vacuum of audial lonesomeness against the white noise of crickets and tree frogs, like percussion with no melody.
I drove through a town whose streets were shortened and whose houses were subtracted from my bigger memory.
Memorially, downtown was an almost endless parade of individual storefronts, many of which I remember walking past in the dead of night, with my Dad on his downtown security route.
Now, as I drove slowly  by, irritably aware of the irritated drivers behind me, I realized that all my remembered significance would pass by in a disinterested blur for anyone who wasn't born here or who never moved.
The library, shrouded in my remembrances as a venerable, benevolently haunted edifice with aisles as distinct and definitive as the Great Wall of China, delineating children's fiction from inscrutable reference tomes, physically haunted by an elderly bald man with a waxed handlebar mustache against which all handlebar mustaches I have ever seen are measured, is now an insurance agency. Ironically, it houses the agency that once resided in the much larger building out on Highway 81 that now hosts the library. Happily, it seems that apparently books have multiplied in an inverse proportion to insurance agents.

Christian Libertarianism

Worldviews change. I prefer to say mine has distilled. Whether or not that is an obfuscation you can only decide for yourself. I have always called my self a conservative, and reluctantly allowed that such a designation, for better or worse, meant I was a Republican. That reluctance is retroactively telling. My reluctance had little to do with the usual accusations leveled at the GOP of being white, rich and out of touch. It had more to do with distrust of any large organization, whether political, civil, ecumenical, etc. And it also had a lot to do with the lack of conviction that was obvious to me. As I grew older, and the ebb and flow of politics became apparent to me, my disgust and distrust mounted. Nothing actually changed, or if it did, it didn't stay changed. It became obvious that survival was the primary aim of almost every politician in which I placed any hope. And for survival, compromise was necessary, usually at the critical juncture, when something decisive was in play. Show votes, faux outrage on the floor of the House and Senate; that was as far as even the most passionate ideologue was willing to go.  I lost it when the Republicans wasted a huge majority in both houses. That was when the meme of Republicans out of power (Rottweiler) and Republicans in power (Chihuahua) became popular. I didn't find it funny. I changed my voter registration to Independent; a symbolic gesture, to be sure, a fist into a brick wall, impotent rage. (Although it does help to announce it on Facebook.) In the year following, with every passing month, my vindication was more and more obvious.
But other things began to dawn on me. Some may find it funny, and it is, in a way, that a battle of wills with our HOA was the beginning of the crystallization of my creeping libertarianism. To make a long story short, at the one and only meeting I attended, I heard about things like uniform mailboxes, not using a sheet in your window, and this was so other people in the neighborhood wouldn't have to look at something unpleasant. It's funny, but it's also a small scale view of how most people think. My neighbor shouldn't do something that makes me unhappy. (Needless to say, the people at that meeting who weren't there because they were mad, were quite likely over-representing this busybody mentality. It was sleeting, and most people were at home, watching the Wildcats play basketball. There were two demographics there. Busybodies, and people mad at the busybodies. The hot-button issue was pushed to a mail-out ballot. Almost no one in the neighborhood responded. The policy stood, but the administration wisely read the mood of some of the more ticked off residents, and neglected to continue to try to enforce it.) 
But the point is, that there was a minority of busybodies, and a vast majority of people who just didn't care. But the idea that I should be forced to accommodate easily offended neighbors even INSIDE my own home got under my skin. When we first we moved to that neighborhood, I was even somewhat enamored of the idea that there were rules that would keep rednecks from trashing the place up. A few years later, I had made a complete reversal. There was a house down on the corner that went months without lawn maintenance. I told my wife that once upon a time, I might have considered bringing this up with the HOA. Now, I told her, I'd cut my own head off before I'd do that. She said she hoped it didn't come to that.
This simple microcosm of the country pushed my limited government views far past the politically expedient neocon views and all the way into a cautious libertarianism.
Events conspired to distill my views on foreign policy, criminal justice, government surveillance, gun control, and even abortion.
I now feel I am more consistent. I will explain as best I can.
I think it's important that a worldview be as consistent as possible an outgrowth of your most deeply held beliefs. I am a Christian before I am anything else (which, by the way, precludes any unchristianization of professing Christians who hold other political views, within reason).
Jesus died for me. Jesus died for you. Jesus did not die for us. God created individuals. God did not create Adam and Eve as prototypes for mass production. He knits each of us together in our mother's wombs; a true original, every last one of us. We are born to immortality, an astounding thought of God. That should be humbling as well as inspiring. Every person is as valuable to God as Adam, His first image. Your self worth is entirely dependent upon your Creator, and as such, is beyond estimation.
In materialism, or physicalism, a person's intrinsic value is dependent on another. In a vacuum, the individual is worthless. He/she must have some consciousness or self-awareness apparent to another person, and thus, have an effect on someone else. Materialists feel that they have the collective intellectual authority to establish personhood. If a man lived and died alone on an empty planet, he was pointless, and effectually non-existent, like the tree in the forest that was not heard falling. A person, theoretically, is of no value or consequence. Only people matter. People can impact one another. People can agree, if only tacitly, on very basic concepts of acceptable and unacceptable. People can have morality. People can have knowledge. People are an end in it's collective self, with no reason for being, other than perpetuation. But that is enough, for them.
There need be no transcendent Cause for the effect of Being.
There can be no denying the fact that God created us as a social animal. We are dependent on others for companionship, for love, for goods and services, but not for intrinsic value. This is the key difference. And this is the foundation for my views, which I will be trying to address, and address "individually."