Was just bitterly apolitical "moderate" in childhood. For as long as I can remember was sympathetic to "rebels" in the media, particularly fond of Robin Hood.

My dad was an army veteran working as a paramedic, my mom a nurse, they worked all the time to make sure we'd be alright. Thankfully I didn't need to think about money or class until like high school, when my dad was arrested and fired for being caught buying heroin. We had no idea he had been using, and it turned out the painkillers he was prescribed for his war injuries built a dependency that quickly led to heroin.

After this my mom struggled to pay the mortgage, even while on welfare and foodstamps. This was most of high school, and I got into punk music and though I really disliked the scene's culture, Pat the Bunny and Mischief Brew led me to explore radical politics and I ended up reading a lot about anarchism.

Now my father's been through rehab twice and was recovering very well, but started having really awful anxiety attacks and flashbacks, probably related to Gulf War syndrome neurological disorder. For a while it was manageable but he started completely dissociating for long periods and running away trying to accomplish "missions". When he'd come to he'd call us, we'd pick him up and he'd be confused and crying and talking about all the people he had killed in the war, talking about how all their families still missed them, and that he didn't deserve to survive. We tried everything we could to get him help, but the VA were horrible, they treated us like shit. We don't have money for a good treatment facility so we had to enter him in the VA hospital's ward, where they treated him like shit. He completely lost his mind in there, broke out and ran away. Completely dissociated. Didn't know who he was, where he was, or what he was doing. Would steal cars, bring them to random places, fill them with random objects and leave them there. I have two little brothers who were terrified and a mother who has been bearing this for years now. No one would help us. The cops wouldn't even listen to us, they completely ignored us. My dad started coming around the house at night banging on the windows yelling about how he needed a "file". One night I wasn't there and he broke in through a window, the rest of my family ran out and stayed at a friends house. We had an alarm on our house because we had been robbed three times (I actually lost like $1200 I made from landscaping in one of the robberies), the cops came from the alarm going off, and they found him standing in the living room sobbing and screaming "I don't know who I am, I don't know who I am, but I keep getting drawn back to this house," and he was surrounded with old pictures of all of us.

He's in another mental hospital now. This last part happened last week. Earlier this summer I traveled around Peru on a shoestring. I've been leaning very left since freshman year of high school, but the combination of these personal experiences and seeing the absolutely disgusting wealth inequality in Peru have really just confirmed all of my suspicions about what's wrong with the world. Seriously, the slums around Lima are unbelievable. I live in Philadelphia and thought that was some deep poverty, but the slums in Latin America stretch for miles, and you'll see millions of people packed into there trying to live and raise families in trash and filth, why new fucking bank towers go up in the downtown and are praised as progress. Then I get to hear fucking american liberals talking about how they think "radical" things are bad.

One of my best friends, also a hardcore commie, has lived in a three room apartment his entire life with both his parents. Each worked two jobs just to pay for rent and food. They're too proud to go on welfare. When his dad, a 55 year old navy veteran, isn't working, he's getting plastered and ranting about blowing up Washington DC while watching anime on netflix. It's kind of funny, but one look at him and you can see how tired, sad, and defeated he is.

I just don't understand how people can look at what happens in the world and be okay with it. I imagine this is what abolitionists must have felt like, being the only sane people in their time who could look at slavery and be appropriately disgusted.

I'm sorry for such an extensive blog /lefty/, but I'm trying to confront a lot of shit right now and a lot of that has to do with leftism.