Socialist Progressives
In reply to the discussion: What led you to socialism? [View all]Starry Messenger
(32,342 posts)The systematic privatization of public school. I have to admit I never really looked at the whole system of economics and politics until a very late age, but being a teacher and seeing our little patch being ravaged led me to question many things that had always puzzled me. A few DUers here were reading Marx and discussing Capital and Value, etc. and their threads on other things led me to trust their point of view. I took the plunge and started reading. The Manifesto nearly made me cry seeing what exactly was in store for education and everything else. But being armed with the knowledge helped me too. I feel like I have more of a direction and I'm not just aimlessly pissed off.
It also helped put into perspective my early life as an exploited wage earner, experiences I had never had a vocabulary for before. I came of age in the Reagan years as a classic suburban 70's kid, went to college and thought that if you hung in and plugged away that eventually you could do what you hoped to accomplish. The "profits before people" life here pretty quickly stripped me of any hopes of doing more than feeding myself and staying sheltered. I did eventually manage to find work as a teacher in my art field, practically a miracle these days. Now, my students are a 100 times more vulnerable, with emails sent out to us high school teachers on how to spot the homeless students and how to support them, etc. Now it is hard not to be angry at people who oppose socialism, because the system that they protect harms so many young people who pass under my care.