Ok, I see what you were getting at now. My long, winding path really started the summer before my first year of college, where I watched a reefer madness dvd with my dad and his wife, after which we talked about how they did it in school and essentially how its not really a bad thing. I spent probably my first two years in school sliding from democrat to libertarian, culminating in watching Michael Badnarik's constitution class(and seeing a fair amount of Stossel along the way). From then on I think I stopped asking 'what does the government do wrong?' and started asking 'what does the government do right?' With that question I went from libertarian to my aforementioned fencesitter status. Something I think that also helped me a bit along the way was reading Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens wherein I realized, at least in one sense, that it was OK to break from my parent's beliefs. (that is, from mennonite to atheism) I do wonder sometimes how much of the stuff regarding religion my parents told me I actually believed, because I don't remember ever actually 'feeling' anything other than the expectations of the people around me, even though I went and did the whole go-to-a-poor-town-and-build-a-porch-for-someone thing.
Always remember to keep TEDE ALARA and DYODD.