For me, two points:
(dating myself here) Minimum wage used to be $5.75 when I was in high school. I worked my ass off for an entire summer. I fuckin hated it, but we all gotta hustle. Around my last shift, I came out to the parking lot, and someone had done my car dirty with a hit’n’run. No note, no CCTV, nothing. The damage was in the neighborhood of $2k, which is exactly everything I had saved up that summer.
I worked my ass off 300 hours to break even. It might as well just have been some community service work release program. Fuck capitalism.
The other is when I was older, post-grad. I had a shitty job where I had to pony up for own health insurance plan with high deductibles. I started having random tingling in my joints, so I did the responsible thing and had it checked out. I got sent to several specialists who ran a battery of tests. I’m already in the hole, $3k out of pocket, and all I got was, “We’re not sure what’s wrong.”
The tingling lingered, and I started looking up information for myself on alternative, holistic sites. Someone had listed similar symptoms and said it was just a vitamin deficiency. That couldn’t be it, right? Well I ordered some supplements, and within a month, the tingling was gone.
$3k down the hole. Fuck capitalism.
2008 - Parents lost their jobs and our house. A family member helped us hide our minivan so that it wouldn’t get taken when my parents filed for bankruptcy.
2010 - I got very lucky and was awarded a spot at the best high school in my area. 99% of my classmates were way above my class status. This took a huge toll on my self-esteem and overall mental health.
The next few years struggling with addiction and mental health problems. Then physical health problems too. Two of my siblings died, one in a car accident and one by suicide. So it goes. My mom develops PTSD. My oldest brother is still struggling with his addiction, and legal problems, and homelessness. It’s just me and him now.
The final straw came in about 2014. I took an Environmental Science class at the local community college and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Holy shit. Within our current system, there’s nothing that can be meaningful done to combat climate change.
And so over the past 6 years I’ve gone from LeftCom to ML, which is kinda funny. I also got sober and graduated from college. My New Career has a lot of similar issues as my previous BS retail/food service jobs. Ah well.
I used to be a “capitalism is the worst system except for every other” liberal. Every election year there’d be a ton of ads claiming that adding a new tax would demolish some sector of the economy and I traced them to the conclusion that the large scale resource distribution that society requires was teetering on the brink and as such we needed capitalism to thread the needle. I went to Las Vegas and it just sort of clicked that, no, we could take the labor and resources we’re allocating to build and maintain a gambling city in the desert and use it to make everyone’s life better.
I’m grateful that it’s not nearly as traumatic as the rest of the posts here
Bailiff got in and took inventory for all of our valuables just because my mother couldn’t pay a parking fine.
Also, I was on a scholarship at a fancy school, and seeing all the rapey racist tory dickheads who will go far in life off daddy’s money is the ultimate case for wealth redistribution.
