Me, four years ago—St. Xavier High School, Cincinnati, Ohio. A Friday night. Future state football champs playing their guts out on the field in front of me. Screaming, cheering, blue-clad St. X students all around me. Us cheering across to the visitors’ stands: “Four more years! Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!”

Me, one month ago—Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. A Thursday afternoon. Chris Matthews and fellow political pundits theorizing on a stage before me. Rowdy, excited, sign-holding Wash. U. students all around me. Us cheering toward the stage and a camera, the eye of a national audience: “Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama!”

The comparison would be striking even if the two cheers’ cadences were not just the same—even if I didn’t have a strange, sudden self-consciousness and self-censoring pause when our cheer for change broke out—even if Wash. U. were not the site of the vice presidential debate. But they were, and I did and it was. It was an odd feeling.

Perhaps I am easily swept up by what goes on feverishly around me. (I am, though less so now after realizing my vast conversion in less than four years.) Perhaps I don’t know much about politics. (I do not, though I would claim to be less naïve than you.) Perhaps I just like to cheer. (Yes.) But perhaps my own personal variability in going from a Jesuit, all-boys high school in Cincinnati to a secular, high-level university in St. Louis is indicative of the variability of all of us, across time and across space—a variability that I am sure most of us would not like to admit.

The reason it is important to remember this drastic personal variability is the potential our political beliefs have to hurt other people. I wrote quite a few columns and made quite a few outrageous statements in the last few months denigrating conservatives and ridiculing the idea that people are poor because they do not work hard enough and that the government should be small and let people founder in the squalor of unbridled capitalism.

But then I talked to my dad, and I was let suddenly into an entirely different world. Before, it was hard for me to conceive of a geographical area that was not predominantly liberal, where general opinion did not hope for drastic change. But here it was, and (strangely for me) it had been there the whole time: My dad held the view that this all tended very much toward an almost militant and certainly dangerous self-righteousness and that all the money we would invest through the government into programs and services would go largely to waste, and this was the view held by many around him as well.

Suddenly, it was okay to have a difference of opinion. We both had uncompromising fundamental beliefs aligned with essentially differing modes of political thought. His was based on experience, mine on hope. His was of a taxpayer, and mine was of a taxpayer’s kid.

The world stopped. If I asserted with the strength with which I felt it what I thought about this election, I would hurt my dad. If he asserted what he thought in the same way, it would hurt me. It was not worth it either way.

I do not mind, really, offending all the people out there who read these articles looking for a fight. It does not bother me that I make generalizations about conservatives that disregard their charity and legitimacy as human beings. I do not even really care if you—you, personally—think I am a worthless, awful, biased writer. But when it comes down to people I love, all this is not really worth it. I like to think that I will never advocate for something so uncompromisingly that I would be willing to do what I did not do when talking to my dad.

I know when I think about it, that when facing the concrete reality of human relationships, political ideology—no matter how strongly we feel about it—is just a silly game.