I was “I don’t care about politics” until 2014.
I thought myself as normal, right in the middle.
At college, I thought I was Mr. Clever and I’d say (in the hippie college I went to but couldn’t afford to finish) –
“If tolerant people are intolerant to intolerant people, aren’t they being intolerant? What if intolerant people tolerate the tolerant people who are intolerant to them? Who’s more tolerant now?”
I was merely being a smartass of course – for me it was just wordplay. Lost a friend or two saying that, stopped saying it. I didn’t mean it personally, just a play on words to me but I was ignorant how I came across.
So I never considered myself anything but independent, normal, in the center. Didn’t ‘get’ why not everybody thought like me.
In 2014 I took a test online. To my utter shock I was down in some ANARCHIST/LIBERTARIAN area way over to “The LEFT”, whatever the hell that was.
Ok, I ‘get’ the anarchist side; I’ve never been authoritarian. But what was this “left” thing?
Looked into it, ok, basic hippie shit. Yeah, sounds like me.
So that was my first realization that there was some kind of label to where I fit and here I was, what, 42 years old in 2014 and I suddenly had some kind of political “tag” on me.
Took a lot of other tests to confirm it as I’m super skeptical by nature and didn’t believe it was true. To me, most things are bullshit but some things aren’t.
So that’s for that.
But all the signs were there if anybody was watching me:
12-13 years old, I read EVERY BOOK in my public library by JOHN HOLT, the Unschooling guy. Why Johnny can’t read or something like that, etc.
I also read SUMMERHILL, the book about the weird English school where there were no grades, all the kids set their own curriculum. Damn thing seemed like paradise.
I realized I wanted to get out of public school. So I found a scholarship thing, wrote some essays, and got a full scholarship to a little K-12 private school that became my 9-12 and I graduated with 12 kids in my class.
So that’s part of my tale.
I’m in the left wing anarchist zone of politics because that’s what the tests say I am. I’ve NEVER felt represented by any politician on the planet, nor have I ever been inspired by any politician from any place in the history of humanity yet. Maybe there’s one out there but I don’t know who that would be. Depends how far you stretch politician maybe as there’s been some religious people that were inspirational.