i lived in a really white town, to the point i hadnt met a single black kid till like 8th grade. how racist everyone was to him was astounding to me, i just couldnt comprehend it. they always called him a problem child, trouble maker, etc. but he legit did nothing at all but chill in the corner. i made friends with him and he was just a quiet guy that didnt really do anything but ignore pretty much everyone, which i dont blame him cause they were all dicks. dude was just vibing
like i was taught communist stuff from a pretty young age but it didnt really sink in until i saw that
Was around 4 or 5 years old at a baby sitter’s with two other kids, one my age and another that might have been a few years older.
In the backyard, the older kid picked up a stick and starting beating the other kid my age. Young kid yelled for the baby sitter and said my name instead of the older kid. Even though they immediately corrected them self, I still got yelled at and spanked.
I got to be pretty insulated and was pretty dense for a lot of my life growing up, so it was just noticing things like the fight for gay marriage and marijuana legalization n shit. But I was living in the passive fantasy that all that was just old and backwards people who’d die off and get outnumbered by young libs like me eventually (when I bothered paying attention at all). Honestly did take the 2016 election to snap me out of the Obama lib mindset and realize it was a completely moribund political project and that, in fact, things could and were getting worse.
Then I met some Trots because they were the first socialist group I happened to notice around, learned what socialism and capitalism are actually centered around, and kinda bounced around different leftist groups and projects from there.
One of my earliest memories of disagreeing with my parents on something political happened when we were watching The West Wing (yeah…). I don’t remember anything else from this show, but I remember one scene where some kid activists come in and try to convince the president that they should lower the voting age, and get shot down with basically no argument “you’re just kids what do you know”. Got into with my mom and she couldn’t come up with a convincing argument beyond “they’ll just vote the way their parents tell them to”, but I gotta say I’m still not convinced by that because it’s the exact same shit they said about extending the vote to women.
