I lean leftwards because I want more people to get the help, dignity and peace they need and deserve. Now I feel a wave of being told to "harden my heart" and I feel scared and isolated. I don't have it in me to become a martyr and estrange myself from most people any further, I get nervous with the leftism I see so often expressed as wanting the bad people suffer, and that anything short of revolution is not just not good enough, but worse than doing nothing. And then I have constant guilt that I'm judging people more discriminated than me for how they express things; that my fears aren't valid and expressions of privilege.
By now I'm feeling emotional burnout, I get annoyed by any respone that isn't in-depth analysis because it just feels like watching the same responses happening over and over and never going anywhere.
I was talking with someone on here this week about how the Nicaraguan revolution very explicitly tried to limit violence and executions, and mandated a max prison sentence (for any crime) of 30 years. And they based this on their Christian faith, and what they believed to be the most faithful interpretation of this.
Contrast this to online left spaces, and principally western online spaces, which have a lot of people whose politics looks like posting (self-crit to myself here too). The impotency of the western left, combined with the counter-insurgent nature of the Internet in general, I think breeds extreme opinions, even if they’re “in jest”. I definitely feel those ways myself sometimes, but I think the only real solution is engaging with people physically, directly, and in common cause. The internet is corrosive and is designed to be, and I think we have to develop habits and discipline to combat this in ourselves. Which ultimately necessitates logging off.