Peter A. Bakke

I was brought up in a military, Republican family and have been a Democrat since I was able to vote. Go figure. I am a Hubert Humphrey, Paul Wellstone Democrat (with a conservative streak - yes we are a thing) who cares for the plight of other people as we all struggle through this thing called life.

I had a moral awakening as a teenager that was essentially formed by a book which I read when I was 13 years old. It was a plain, gray-colored book with no dust cover sitting on my grandmother’s bookshelf in the tiny burg of Gaylord, Minnesota. It looked quite boring, frankly, but I knew it was one of those 'adult' books that I had yet to start reading and something about the title intrigued me. I was forever changed by reading it. The novel was about good and evil. It was about man’s inhumanity to man. It was about justice and injustice. It was about innocence and depravity. It was about truth and the people who pervert it to their unjust ends. It was about love and bitter hate. It was about the human condition. It was Harper Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

My life motto is to live and let live. The Golden Rule is not a cliche.

A corollary to that perspective, however, is to never, ever give in to those who want to take away your morally grounded rights or the similarly foundational rights of others.