Reply #12: I'm embarrassed to say [View All]

[tavalon]

that I wasn't yet politically woken up. Yeah, I voted for Gore and was appalled at what happened afterwards but I didn't understand how treasonous what the Supreme Court did was. And since I was from Texas and had seen the idiot not govern, I figured he was pretty harmless and while I didn't appreciate having a Republican in there, I figured people would figure out he was stupid and useless and he would be a one termer, like his dad. I never imagined 9/11 nor the ability of this regime to ride the subsequent surge of nationalism to fascism.

I was politically woken up by what I saw in the months after 9/11 when my neighbors in a traditionally liberal area of Austin began draping themselves with American flags. I felt an increasing sense of unease and when I put out a World flag and had my house egged, I started trying to figure out what was going on. Around that time, a friend of mine (who was 50 at the time and so had been through the 60s as a teenager) began telling me about the military industrial complex and the way things had been in Vietnam and she told me that we would soon be going to war. She did a one person consciousness raising on me.

The whole thing snowballed for me and now I'm uber aware, a DU junkie and have been to many protests. I had always voted but in 2004, I actually volunteered for the Kerry campaign and last year I took the Wellstone activist training. I even pay close attention to local politics now. Hell, it's my whole life pretty much.