Hmm…firstly, I don’t see political ideology as some consumerist notion of shopping for pre-packaged belief system. I tend to pick and choose what feels like an articulation of my personal values as I feel strongly that going along to get along is only appropriate if you already feel that way, like choosing a concert to go to based on likeing the band and not just the social activity for its own sake.

My father was a part-time minister in the Church of God and career military and every now and then pro-union (though not around my Mom) and my Mom still goes to her Baptist Church at 91 years old (evidently my Dad’s church just wasn’t down-low racist enough ha ha) so the notion that there is one belief system I am locked into wasn’t forced on me. They never insisted I choose a church I think because they would have to start a war with each other to force that on their kids, that left me in the rare position of being clear and free to go to church or not. They had agreements on values that their churches embodied on a personal level but left the protestant bickering out of it.

So then I stared to realize I was also generally clear and free to navigate institutional social groups of all kinds, which in my young mind translated over to politics. i didn’t shop for ideologies, but instead dabbled in everything.

I had a friend that had the George Carlin vinyl records which was a mind blowing thing, I never heard anything like that at home. My friend then told me and another guy in 5th grade we didn’t have to stand for the pledge of allegiance at the school assembly so we didn’t. I remember a male teacher grabbing my ear and dragging me to my feet…but I remember the hatred and cruelty in his eyes. I’ve seen that same look when you try to talk about socialism or communism or the USSR. Hatred and cruelty and rage in the eyes of people that were otherwise ordinary American adults, even my parents. And it is so sudden, it’s quite startling like Dr jekyll and Mr Hyde.

My first presidential election was Reagan’s second term. I hated Reagan, but back then i couldn’t articulate why i did, i would have said something like “you al voted for him because he is a charming movie star” which I think was a big motivator back then, now celebrity is pretty much a necessity to win the popular vote which explains the Don. Before Reagan, ordinary people viewed the President as a leader due to the post WW2 militarism but mostly like the guy doing the job and he better do it well or we’ll vote him out (not that they would, just the everyday sentiment of ordinary folks).

I was very anti-war for a lot of reasons, mostly I think because it took my Dad away for years at a time when I was small, I didn’t realize that at the time but full disclosure. Unfortunately I was still steeped in American Classical Liberalism so moving left was forbidden, my parents as well being products of WW2 propaganda and then the huge coup of the post FDR era including McCarthyism and anti-communism. My Mom could never say “asian” or “Viet Namese” but one of an assortment of colorful racial epithets

So I was was left voting for Libertarians as the only anti-war vote I would make. As time went on, and I entered the work force, I saw first hand how the boss never worked and we got peanuts in the post Reagan non-union factories that popped up like mushrooms in the eighties (they vanished the day NAFTA was signed, the one I worked at moved to Mexico). That’s when I started to see that most folks ideologies around politics was blind social in-grouping and sating vulgar appetites and that real politics was brutal power. Bosses abusing us and keeping us poor and frightened.

I remember during Bush Sr starting the first Iraq war, my ex SIL came home with a “Desert Storm” t-shirt with a big eagle design and my brother talking about bombing those racial epithets into glassy craters hyuk hyuk. I remember how horrified I was for humanity and how I had to keep a straight face because I knew it was a losing battle.

I kind of gave up on politics after that like a depressive fugue until the internet got popular, because at that point it was easy to see that involvement in American politics was basically entertainment. But online, it was liberating to think and feel whatever i wanted without fear of reprisal for not conforming to the capitalist status quo (I didn’t yet realize that was what it was)

The candidacy of Bernie Sanders was the first time I ever actually had spontaneous and sincere feelings about participating in politics, it had always been some boring perfunctory rehash of failed ideologies that hid the powerful from scrutiny. But Bernie captured my spirit and my imagination. I started to understand the gut feelings I had all along were about Capitalism and how it hurts us and I started seeing videoes and tweets form people who articulated my nascent left values and I just kept going from there.