If you were to see me walk into a room and you reacted at all, you would likely think "White, middle-aged, businessman. Nice tie." My liberal friends tend to think I'm a liberal and my conservative friends tend to think I'm a conservative. But if a discussion really gets heated, and I really get pushed, I am sometimes apt to blurt out "I find it hard enough to be a good Catholic without also having to figure out how to be a good conservative or a good liberal too!"What a wonderfully pretentious thing to say, you may be thinking. And you are no doubt correct. But as I try to be a good Catholic (and I am a Third Order (Secular) Franciscan candidate right now so I am called upon lately to really think about these things by my new family) I find that relative to right and left I am deeply confused.I feel deeply conservative when I say that I oppose abortion even in cases of rape and incest. I feel deeply liberal when I say that it does not follow from this that pregnancy is any kind of punishment that some women should endure for "mistakes", nor that poor women should just be thrown to the dogs in our individualistic bootstrap society, nor that the bulk of the abortion problem will be solved if we can just put the issue back into the hands of the police. I feel like a liberal when I say that we need some serious Federal support for universal health care. But I feel like a conservative when I make an argument for this based on sound, capitalistic business principles. But I feel like a liberal when I also make an argument for the same thing that appeals to charity.When I think of the short list of authors whose new releases I will always purchase out of the gate, I feel like a total conservative when I say that I can't walk past a book by John Lukacs or Ralph McIntyre and a total liberal when I say the same about Thomas Merton or Ivan Illich. (My beloved Alasdair Macintyre, on the other hand, seems to straddle the divide, to few people's complete satisfaction.)When I say that when push comes to shove I'd have to say that I'm a Catholic first and an American second, I feel like a liberal. When I say that I consider myself an America loving patriot precisely in John Lukac's sense of the word, I feel like a conservative. When I say that I think that American nationalism is at least as big a threat to Christian civilization as American secularism, I'm not sure what I feel like.To mix this up further, I seem to possess certain wicked traits that seem to me more human than conservative or liberal. For example, I have been known to feel a vicious little thrill when someone scores a snarky but witty point in a political discussion, especially when the person saying it is me. I sometimes get angry at complete strangers on the internet and I have been even known to feel a little shiver of joy when I see some poor soul from a political group that I don't like get embroiled in a personal scandal. Like all of us, I look for coherence. But I just don't see it on the left or the right.I see a sloppiness everywhere, and most of all with myself. The only thing I can think of to do, and not very consistently, is to tell myself that no matter how stupid, misguided, depraved or wicked someone seems to me to be in the political sphere, I am no less stupid, misguided, depraved or wicked myself. Sometimes this allows me to keep myself in perspective.Color me human.