Meesh, you summed up all the things I've been seeing! Yep, yep! And the conservative, Christian values and fears of colleges and liberals, all that is how I've always lived, but it's all in flux. Actually, being a part of these forums the last few years has had tremendous influence. As silly as it sounds, in my very limited, very rigid religious circles, the impression i came away with was that outside of solid, ultra conservative Christianity, kids were pretty much doomed to a life of poor choices, moral compromises, broken marriages, blah blah blah. And living in this drug dive, the only kids who seem to survive are the Christians, and the few whose parents give up and move away when they hit middle school or high school. There's just no proper basis for comparison.
And then came mmm forums, full of liberal, progressive democrats, who make smart financial decisions and loathe trump, lol. And they seem to have good marriages, in fact, I hear a lot less about divorce and marital discord here than I do in my religious circles. And you raise kids, and they seem to get through their teens and even twenties without getting pregnant, or ODing, or wearing distasteful hats on their heads at protest rallies, lol. They go to college, they sure sound like good, solid productive people. And I can't help but see all this, and start to think my worldview is not only severely limited, like peephole limited, but I've probably been fed a lot of propaganda along the way as well.
So yes, the wheels have been turning slowly these last few years, but they're in motion now, and I'm getting a much wider viewpoint, and I intend to keep broadening that. There was a post on here a while back about losing ones religion, there's me in the corner, and it sooo resonated with me. I've got a long, long road ahead of me to figure things out, and get my thinking straightened out, but at least now I feel like the blinders have been pulled off, and I can actually see the genuine landscape.
So thank you to the mmm community, for being real, and sharing not just your budgets here, but your personal lives and thought processes. You never know who's watching you, and the positive impact you might have on them, their kids, and generations to come.