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.
Yes, revolution is certainly necessary, but if you live in the imperial core you can at your option take comfort for now that it probably will not come to where you are for quite some time. In that time countless acts of structural and actual violence are visited upon the working class all over the world by the bourgeoisie. I hope at the very least that when a revolution does occur or has occurred in your own country or elsewhere you will investigate before you speak and not rush to condemn it simply because it happens to be violent, as all successful revolutions will be to some extent. It is also almost certain that the scale of violence required for such a revolution is less by orders of magnitude than the scale of violence required to maintain and extend the capitalist world system.
Mark Twain's "two reigns of terror" quote goes here.