So I have two kids, 11 and 14, and I think they’re actually older than any of the other kids that other users on this website might have. Like a good communist, I made sure to brainwash my children when they were young, and I even homeschooled them for the first three years of the pandemic. Eventually they asked to go back to school and I couldn’t really stop them. They’ve actually had a great time there, they’re doing really well and they seem very popular, but especially my older kid has been having such a good time that he started doubting that America was bad, and has just kind of been drifting into liberalism, although I could still get him to say cool things like free Palestine, which liberals won’t usually say. He also developed a serious interest in sports, sadly just watching rather than playing, and I don’t know where that comes from because neither of his parents are really interested in watching sports, but seemingly it’s what everyone at his school loves. He was also repeating a lot of the usual liberal nonsense to me about China and the Soviet Union.
Anyway, over the last couple of weeks he’s become pretty obsessed with Epstein, and has been sending me lots of TikTok videos about the usual Epstein-related things, and yesterday he just suddenly told me that ”maybe the commies are the good guys because at least they aren’t eating children.” He stopped arguing with me about China and the Soviet Union, and seems slightly more interested in getting a more left perspective on these and other similar subjects. I don’t know how long this will last, but it’s just a minor hopeful sign. I know that most liberals and conservatives are just kind of doing their best to focus only on how Epstein implicates their enemies, rather than the system itself, but some people at least might be shaken out of the capitalist ideological paradigm.
It's been a while but I don't think I would have even been capable of understanding politics as a teen/preteen.
Is it a function of the world today being more connected and teens having more chance to see political stuff accidentally?
Were a lot of you other olds politically engaged at such a young age and I'm just a product of the privilege of not having to think about politics?
Could also be that I only cared about starcraft broodwar and diablo 2 at the time
One of the aims of capital with the destruction of proletarian culture from the late 1800s onwards was to destroy the close ties within the working class friend and family groups
They did this most obviously by literally bulldozing their neighbourhoods, but schools to seperate children from worker parents to indoctrinate them, providing treats to focus on instead and instilling middle class manners ("dont talk about politics at the dinner table, dont ask a man his wage etc") were also key parts of this
As empire implodes and treats dry up, reproletarianization proceeds and politics returns to children and family
I think we’re about the same age. I became interested in politics around the eighth grade when W. stole the election. A lot was going down around that time. My family, especially my dad, was also very lib and talked about politics all the time.