When I first contemplated writing this column, I thought it would be interesting to show how moving from the East Coast to Montana and then living here for nearly 30 years had changed me from a big-city liberal to a small-town conservative.

It sounded like a great idea to show how people can change their ideas in response to new input — only the more I thought about it, the more I realized it just wasn’t true.

I didn’t change because I had moved from New York to Montana, and for that matter I didn’t even really change for the first 20 to 25 years I lived here — despite the benefits of a small-town Western lifestyle. There was no education involved in my change from liberal to conservative. Indeed, when I first came to Montana in 1977, I was just one more long-haired Missoula graduate student who already thought he knew more than any real Montanan could possibly teach him. Fortunately, Montana conservatives are better mannered than Missoula graduate students, so none of them ever did volunteer to “educate” me — otherwise I probably would have been whooped within an inch of my life.

Sadly though, that left me to wander in the political wilderness for another 20-plus years equipped with nothing more than a liberal arts education to guide me toward the truth. And as every college sophomore should know, a liberal arts education is the last thing you would want to have as a compass in your search for truth because the purpose of a liberal arts education is to convince you that there is no such thing as truth.

Needless to say, my journey from big-city liberal to small-town conservative was therefore not exactly represented by that straight line which is the shortest distance between two points. Well, if we are being strictly honest, there actually was no journey from big-city liberal to small-town conservative. Although I did move to little old Kalispell in 1984, I only managed to transform myself from a big-city liberal to a small-town liberal. Conservative never figured in the equation.

Let’s get this “inconvenient truth” straight. I voted for Al Gore in 2000, just as I had voted for every other Democratic presidential candidate from 1976 to 2000 except one.

The exception was in 1980, but I can’t claim I was smart enough to see that Ronald Reagan was actually smarter than me. Instead I was part of the 6.61 percent who voted for independent candidate John Anderson for president because I was fooled into thinking HE was smarter than me. Anderson was a liberal Republican who thought that Reagan was too stupid to be president, but now I just feel stupid for voting for him.

But let’s face it: If I hadn’t voted for Anderson, it wouldn’t have been Reagan who would have gotten my vote, but Jimmy Carter, that peanut farmer from Georgia who had mucked up the economy and turned our embassy staff in Tehran into jihad fodder. I couldn’t help myself. I was a liberal. A Walter Mondale liberal. A Michael Dukakis liberal. A Bill Clinton liberal. Even a Jimmy Carter liberal in 1976.

Nonetheless, by the end of 2004, when I started writing this column, something had happened. Somehow I voted for the first time in my life for a Republican for president — and not just any Republican, but George W. Bush, the very model of the privileged, silver-spooned GOP that I had despised since I was first told that Republicans were the party of the rich and the richer.

So if it wasn’t just a change of scenery from the Hudson River to the Flathead River that converted me from liberalism to conservatism, what was it? What had brought me from the pinnacle of arrogance, the absolute certainty that like all liberals I was smarter than all conservatives, to the refreshing waters of humility — the certain absolution of realizing that I wasn’t smart enough to make even one liberal see the error of their ways?

In essence, it was a “Road to Damascus” experience. One morning, on my way to work I got hit by lightning — the lightning of God talking to you loud and clear and telling you that everything you know is wrong.

I am referring to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Do I have to explain why?

Every conservative already knows — and all the liberals reading this right now just don’t care because all they can focus on is how dopey we conservatives are for thinking that God (if there were one!) might have any interest in talking to us in the first place.

But whether liberals want to talk about it or not, 9/11 was the wakeup call to remind us that evil is real. George Bush, to his credit, saw this almost immediately, and started sounding like an itinerant preacher (or like Abraham Lincoln) recognizing that the Great Divide is not between Democrats and Republicans but between good and evil. He didn’t have to convince me. I woke up and saw a burning tower with people falling from the sky, and then watched an airliner fly into the side of a second tower in a giant fireball. I didn’t need anyone to explain evil to me.

I assumed the same enlightenment that had come to me that morning had also been shared by all my fellow Americans — that we could no longer take our lives, our liberty, or our pursuit of happiness for granted. I guess my lingering naivete could be called the last vestige of my liberalism. I really believed that 9/11 was going to be my generation’s equivalent of Pearl Harbor — that our nation would join together in a massive response that would defend liberty and the Constitution from the assault of barbarians.

And we did — for about a week.

As time went on though, it became more and more clear that America had no stomach for defending freedom, no will for standing up to bullies, and no united front. When Democrats started protesting against President Bush for his unyielding opposition to al-Qaida and Islamic terrorism, I started getting the nauseated feeling I have had ever since. This country was apparently doomed. The feel-good fix of liberalism had infected the body politic so deeply that it could not be flushed out by even the violent, virulent “treatment” of an assault on our homeland.

Everything which I could see so clearly, and which led me to shout “Never Again,” was invisible to millions of Americans. It was then that I came to realize that the truth may set you free, but you can’t expect it to do a darn thing for your country.

More and more I think we are each on our own, and that while salvation may be available on an individual basis, our doom is almost certainly to be collective. There are just too many people with liberal-arts educations nowadays to hope that the truth will ever again become common knowledge.

So today, yes, I am a conservative. I reckon my way forward by consulting the navigational maps left by Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and good old George Washington. Sometimes I even try to share a vision of hope for the future based on the wisdom of those men and the Constitution they wrote. It’s not easy to pass that vision on though, because to our politically correct culture with its steroid-like rage induced by addiction to entitlements, those Founding Fathers are just a bunch of racist old white men.

It’s a lot easier to just give up and let people get the government — and ultimately, the anarchy — they deserve. I suppose I could just stop caring, go back to writing columns about football and Indian tacos and movies I saw last week. Maybe I will.

I told a story in one of my columns about a call I received in 2005, just a few months after I had started writing this “Editor’s 2 cents” column in the Inter Lake. This elderly reader wanted to know why I was wasting his time — why in other words I was writing about what was going on in my own life when what was going on in Washington, D.C., was so much more important and was going to affect not just my life but all our lives. I don’t remember everything he said, but I vividly recall his conclusion:

“Why don’t you write about something that matters? Don’t waste my time!”

I have tried to keep that reader in mind in the years that followed, and I hope you think that I have lived up to my obligation not to waste your time. I’m with that old codger today more than ever. He was a wise man. If you can’t write about something that matters, why write about anything at all?

The rest, as Shakespeare said, is silence.