When I was sixteen years old, I worked for the 110th US Congress as a Congressional page. The page program is now defunct (largely due to some highly publicized incidents that happened in the years following a scandal involving former Congressperson Mark Foley and children he groomed during their time in the program) but it was an extremely cool, otherworldly experience. There were—as best I recall—65 of us, all high school juniors. We lived together and ate together and went to school each morning from 6:45 until sometime between 8:45 and 11:30 AM—depending on whether Congress was in session that day. We then worked running documents, raising flags, ringing bells, and delivering phone calls to members of Congress and their staff. It was my first experience with real, multi-leveled diversity of peers: socioeconomic, geographic, racial. All American, of course, but a diverse group in every other sense. We all had very strong, very idealistic political opinions (or, perhaps more precisely, we had idealistic opinions of politics and politicians. As best I can tell, roughly 100% of us applied for the program because we wanted political careers and none of us work as politicians on political staffs, as lobbyists, or for think tanks. Cynicism can be developed very early when you see how they make the sausage.) and authentically different backgrounds that led us to those views.
Page school was the first place I developed the ability to listen to someone who thinks differently than I do, with the intention of understanding their argument and logic, with the intention of learning something about them and by extension about myself, rather than with the intention of immediately, passionately, and condescendingly spitting my contradicting views. It’s where I learned to set preconceptions and anger aside and hear people where they are, rather than where I want them to be. I have many fond memories of that time—I am tempted to tell you a fun and not insignificant story of a grassroots, page-led lobbying effort that ended in a charismatic and kind Southern Methodist former pastor appearing on the sacred floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote on legislation with his suit jacket covered in more than twenty hand decorated, brightly colored stickers, endorsing the expansion of health care coverage for children of low income families. But that is a story with no long-reaching personal consequences and with no moral. (Other than that, perhaps, there’s always a place for a little irreverence when you need to achieve something. Perhaps a little irreverence is the only way to get things done.) So instead I will tell you the story of the moment that I discovered what I consider to be my defining quality. As with all defining qualities, it’s my greatest strength and my greatest weakness.