Let’s Begin: A Little…Or A lot About Me.

I’m fairly certain that I’m engaging in mental masturbation here, rambling on about what my life has taught me and how I think that my perception on the world today has been affected by those experiences. To whatever value this holds for anyone that bothers to read it, I hope that it expresses to you these simple aspects of myself and nothing more. I don’t aim to convince anyone of my opinions per se, instead I hope that demonstrating some of the pivotal moments in my life affected how I reached my conclusions. Also, I hope that this will better help someone understand why some may think as I do. In regard to what value this holds for me, I’m still rooting that out. However, I hope that the value it brings me is to better help me work through the areas and topics where I have a hard time settling on what is “right”, “good”, and “moral”. This may be a bit vague in this stage of the blog’s journey, but I intend in later blog posts to dig into those topics. Before all of that though, it will be difficult to understand where my perspective comes from without knowing a little bit about me. So here it goes.

My mother is a Norwegian from a small town outside of Oslo born in 1958 and my father is a Missourian born to a wealthy family in 1960. My father’s side of the family, although wealthy during his childhood, lost that fortune for several reasons I won’t bother boring you with. Suffice it to say, when I was born there were no silver spoons left. In 1985 we moved to Norway, I was two years old at the time, and interestingly and of course terribly Chernobyl happened the following year. It’s odd as I sit here at 39 years of age and can still vividly remember that. The scene was almost surreal to me, at that age I loved my sandbox and I especially loved playing with my excavator that was in the sandbox. For those that missed out on all the sandbox fun during their childhood (insert level of sarcasm here that you prefer), we would put them in sandboxes and using the swivel feature and two levers to control the boom we’d move sand around. I guess I was always destined to be a blue-collar worker, or perhaps that’s just where my interests lie. I remember wanting to play in the sandbox and being told that it would make me sick. I don’t know if that was parental fear mongering or if it is technically true that sand absorbs radiation, regardless, no sandbox for me. We lived in Norway for five years until Norway went through a recession and both my parents lost their jobs. My father called his brother in San Antonio, Texas and asked if there were any opportunities in San Antonio for us. As it turned out my uncle was a realtor and owned a healthy number of rental homes and each one needed regular lawn maintenance. My father offered to move there and open a lawn maintenance company, and after my little brother was born in 1990, we packed our things and moved. My family was now a lawn mowing family.

Leaving Norway was traumatic for me, well at least as traumatic as a seven-year-old is capable of feeling. I cried over the car when we sold it, I couldn’t fathom not seeing my family there everyday, I couldn’t understand the heat of south Texas and why anyone would ever opt to live there, and the language barrier and my bashfulness about speaking English made the whole experience pretty unenjoyable. Despite all of these trepidations, of which I’m certain my parents’ were more daunting, regardless we took the leap. I give my parents a good deal of credit for their bravery in their decision, I truly don’t know who I would be had I not grown up in Texas. Once we were moved in and settled, to whatever degree we were, off to mowing lawns my parents went. Mom on the push mower and dad running the edger and blower. Most days they’d leave before sunrise and often not come home until late evening, income and bills are obviously a pain in the ass and kind of important. I carried on being a seven-year-old that could barely speak English, even though I understood a good amount. this just resulted in hours of homework playing catch up to the Texas schooling system. I recognize that the American education system is poor so I can see the oxymoron I just committed there. To say it was a difficult time would be an understatement, but that struggle bred in me a level of autonomy and self-sufficiency that I carry still today. After a few years we were fully assimilated into the Texas culture, and especially the unique San Antonio culture. It’s hard to imagine for Americans today, but where I grew up in Norway there wasn’t much diversity of any kind (at least not in the American sense). Plainly speaking, Norway is very white. Interestingly though, race was also nonexistent. I had no concept of it, the idea that people would be different because of their appearance was literally completely foreign to me. It’s easy to guess that San Antonio is not by any stretch all white but it was where I first learned that I was white and that others were Hispanics, Asians, African Americans, and so on. I can’t remember any real overt racism then, I’m certain it happened sometime during my childhood either to me, from an adult around me, or something else. But race and racism was easy to grasp and the evils of it just seemed obvious to me.

Scholastically I was relatively adept and could at least claim not to be a complete idiot, I stress the term complete here because I’ve certainly been an idiot and will be one again. Middle school was tough, largely because I was just a tiny kid. If I could have kickstarted puberty I would have, but alas I could not and my growth spurt didn’t kick in until my Freshman year of high school. Because of the teasing, or I guess today we just lump it all into bullying, I didn’t want to go to the high school that my district funneled into because all the kids that had their opinions of me would be there too. Lucky for me San Antonio had started a few magnet schools and the one that stood to me was the International School of the Americas. It was a lottery draft school, so grades to enter didn’t matter just had to hope to be lucky. The school focused on global affairs, it required a minimum of three years of language, all the courses were either honors or AP, and we had to maintain a B average to keep our enrollment. I had a great high school career, I got to completely reinvent myself…more realistically I was finally allowed to be myself. I need to make a quick sidebar here because this will be important for things I write later. As I experienced it, sex ed was in its waning years of fighting over whether schools should be teaching abstinence or contraception. The contraception side ended up being the winner, although I did hear abstinence at least once and considered it never. Sex was ubiquitous throughout my high school career whether in conversation, behind buildings, in cars, at parties, in our movies, shows, and music. I was very susceptible to it, even to the point where I idolized the main character in the movie Cruel Intentions. If you don’t know it, it came out in 1999 with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe. I was relatively popular in high school, which gave me a much undeserved inflated ego. An ego that was shattered as I entered college.

Oh, college and the promises we were made. I never really needed or wanted to continue my education. I did, however, fully buy into the concept that without a degree you’d be poor and that college was the super party that high school had so well prepared me for. It’s obvious to figure out the outcome, it took a semester for me to rack up $20,000.00 in student loans, be hospitalized with severe bronchitis due to lack of sleep and alcoholism, I didn’t stop drinking and that alcoholism led to me having a grand mal seizure and culminating in me leaving the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business with a phenomenal GPA of .25. Needless to say, I’m a winner. From there I attempted some more school and eventually dropped out to work for a landscaping company. Two and half years later I enlisted in the United States Air Force and was in the most deployed career field in the military. For my six-year enlistment, I spent three years of it in training (way to avoid education Phil!) followed by successive deployments to Qatar, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In the three years of active duty, I deployed for over 500 days and flew over 1500 combat hours in varying intelligence collection platforms. I was fortunate enough to augment the Army and assist special operation forces in prosecuting high value targets, but I was unfortunate as well to suffer the repercussions of those deployments through PTSD, moral confusion, and depression. War is necessary at times, you won’t get any argument from me, but it is abhorrent and must have a rigorous moral justification. That’s all the time I’ll spend here on my military career, I’ll touch more on it as I discuss the military, war, and foreign affairs later. 

For a multitude of reasons I separated from the military after my six year enlistment and came back home to San Antonio to partner with my father in his holiday decorating company. Holiday decorating sounds like much more than what we do, we used to call it our “Christmas lighting business” but you can guess at the reason for why we swapped our descriptor there. For a few years I trudged along battling alcoholism and depression after leaving the military. A kernel of why I believe you begin to suffer from PTSD is because you end up leaving your tribe that endured what you endured, losing the outlet to express your frustrations and troubles…especially if you have security clearances. I finally found an outlet and the motivation to begin to do the hard work on myself. Step one was joining a CrossFit affiliate. This had the automatic bonus of limiting my drinking, because working out hungover sucks. Trust me, I tried it a lot! That fulfilled many of the goals I had set out to achieve, save one. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted a family, and as I was in my early thirties that want became more prescient. Even though CrossFit improved my mental state, I was still suffering. That’s when I met my future wife, and yes I met her at the gym (sorry CrossFitters I could never bring myself to call it a “box”). I credit her, truly, for saving my life. She showed me a level of care and understanding that I had never felt, and she pulled me out of a very deep hole. But we all know how deep holes in life work, they aren’t singular and never really go away. I have never been able to effectively empathize with others, which has led to a number of missteps in relationships and my marriage was no exception. A relationship is a two-way road and I don’t blame myself solely for my marriage’s failure, but I do believe my inability to understand her emotional state played a big part. The rifts between us were easy to cover up by going on vacations, to dinners, bars, and wineries but then the fateful year of 2020 came. The disease that I shall dub “the rift exposer” or “the dumbest response to a disease ever” or “the kind of deadly cold that ruined society” exploded on to the scene and through some level of complete stupidity we locked ourselves in our house for months. Side note, it also didn’t help that we were on opposite sides of the Covid debates, maybe those were the rift exposers? We managed to cling to our marriage through 2021 but divorced the following year. That essentially brackets some of the pivotal moments in my life that have had a substantial affect on my thinking.

This has ended up being a significantly longer bio than I intended. I think it’s important, though, to share them if for no better reason so that I can clearly express to myself and any potential reader the experiences that have led to the viewpoints that I have. I genuinely want the best for everyone, and as best as I can tell so does everyone else. We simply differ on what is “best” and “good” and how to achieve an outcome that benefits everyone. Fundamentally I believe in American Exceptionalism and that it is achieved through the rigorous introspection of the self and agreement that through cooperation toward the goal of advancement results in the best outcomes for individuals. That coupled with a limited interpretation of the bill of rights and the articles of the constitution enables the largest number of people in our population to set out on the journey of self-development and happiness. Freedom of expression allows us to sort through the spectrum of good and bad ideas, and through federalism we are allowed to test those ideas in different locales where our values are simply rank ordered differently. We are fortunate when those ideas are found to be useful and beneficial and can be adopted by other communities to implement.