The first protest I ever went to was early in the Obama administration. It was an anti-war protest. I rode into DC on a bus chartered by the Green Party and carried around a US flag with me. While I was there I bumped into a dude with a big red hammer and sickle flag who breifly tried to educate me that the flag I was carrying was a symbol of exploitation, domination, and imperialism. His message didn’t sink in though. I replied, this flag is ours. We need to take it back from those assholes (gesturing towards the Capitol). He gave up on me pretty quickly after that and walked away, but he didn’t insult me or anything. My brainworms were too deep at the time.

I got pretty involved with OWS a few years later after seeing the Obama administration lean into the new powers afforded by the Patriot Act and escalate the Afghanistan War, rather than reversing course on those consequential Bush-era regressions. I hadn’t lost my job in the 2008 recession, but it was readily apparent working in retail that management held all the power and was turning the screws. I remember a manager telling someone “Hey if you don’t want to do it, I’ve got a stack of 100 applications right here.”

OWS was a hella informative experience. I was still politically illiterate at the time, but by then I had the clear sense that society’s most pressing problems were all interrelated. I might have agreed that Capitalism as the nexus of those problems, though I probably would have just chalked it up to corruption and greed. I did not have the theoretical foundation necessary to indict Capitalism itself. While I was there, I learned a lot of things. How effective autonomous working groups can be at handling tasks like food preparation, sanitation, shelter, teach-ins. How detrimental pedantic horizontalism could be to the agility and growth of a movement under rapidly changing circumstances and a hostile media environment. How much the press will absolutely lie about unfolding events (this was a BIG one. It is something you need to see to truly grasp.). And finally, how cops are bastards who will arrest kids for drawing with sidewalk chalk and pepper spray kettled women simply for resembling the blue haired liberal caricature Republican media trained them to hate.

There are other things I didn’t soak in until later. Like significance of the heavy FBI and DHS presence. Or the ulterior motives of some media outlets which provided friendly coverage (such as RT).

A short while later, I dabbled breifly with Libertarianism. I had a cool liberal history teacher in high school who talked about Thomas Paine and Thoreau a bit, and walked us through the constitution and the bill of rights pretty enthusiastically. He was the only public school teacher I ever heard say anything like “don’t talk to cops unless you’re asking ‘am I being detained for am I free to leave.’” As I got older, I began noticing many times how these rules derived from the constitution had simply been trampled on by both parties. The visible erosion of civil liberties turned me into a Libertarian. However, my Libertarian phase ended as quickly as I learned the majority of Libertarians thought handing power back to the party which gave us the wars and the Patriot Act was the solution.

Then for a while I was stuck in the mire of Liberalism. Not the kind who could stomach voting for Clinton, but enough of a lib to buy the hysteria about Putin and the crisis of our noble institutions wholesale. I became an r/Politics shitlib. I became such an onerous shitlib that they asked me multiple times to run for Senate in a state already controlled by Democrats. I went to a few of shitlib rallies. When the Mueller Report finally came, I went to a MoveOn rally demanding Trump’s immediate impeachment. This is something even the Brookings Institution nerds were ready to pull the trigger on, and the newly elected Democratic House tossed the report straight in the trash.

The speeches at that protest were a lot more radical than ones I had been to recently. The line I remember most was given by an undocumented teenager who said, speeking of the general inaction of Congress, “Time is a privilage we do not have.” It only took a couple months of the Liberals getting another crack at power to demonstrate that after all the cries about constitutional crises and the erosion of democracy, they don’t actually give a flying fuck. That is around the time I became a Chapo poster.