i want to say something about how i ended up in the wrong group of activists, though. it goes back to a kind of common error i've come up against over and over again, which is that i tend to base my primary means of learning on written material, and it often ends up contradicted by reality.

probably the first time i noticed this was when i realized i could spell words i couldn't pronounce correctly, and that this was kind of endemic, actually. i guess it was some time near the end of high school, when i found myself in a social group for really the first time in my life. in the midst of conversation, i would repeatedly pronounce things in ways that would get strange glances, or requests for repetition. "oh, you mean..." and then they would present the pronunciation that they'd heard. this often had the effect of challenging my credibility on the topic, because i was using all of these weird pronunciations. how well could i understand a concept if i couldn't enunciate it?

well, the truth is that these are things i'd been reading about in books and online for years, but that i hadn't actually heard anybody talk about before. my father was a jock, and my mother was a drunk - they didn't and don't have large vocabularies. i grew up desperately poor for the first ten years of my life; when my father remarried, he married into the middle class, but it was into a conservative section of the middle class, and it didn't meaningfully increase my exposure to people using larger words. so, i was reading at a university level when i was 10, i was in the 95th+ percentile on all of the standardized tests, but i had no exposure to anybody actually using any of these words. in english, spelling it out only goes so far, too - you can't just figure it out.

i often found myself explaining this, but it was rarely actually effective, because people are shallow idiots. i more often found myself written off, despite usually being the most knowledgeable person in the room. it's how people are.

likewise, i suspect most people probably end up in a political movement by meeting people, rather than by reading books. if there's much of any intellectual component to it, it's usually going to come after the fact, and have little meaningful effect. the normal way that people are going to do this is that they're going to go to a protest and ask the people there what's happening and determine if they like the people or not.

i did this the exact opposite way - i read up on a bunch of leftist writers, and then i went out looking for leftists, only to find that they didn't really uphold the ideals i'd previously read about. then, we get into this definitional debate: is the left this thing that exists in front of us all that calls itself the left, or is it this thing that exists in these books? and, i want to point to the books, and they want to point to themselves.

if you look at the literature closely enough, it does make some sense. what marx criticized as "utopian" came from conservative origins. in a sense, both marxism and conservatism are reactions to liberalism. and, it's not exactly easy to extricate yourself from capitalism, while existing smack in the middle of it.

but, that's not what you're thinking when you show up at one of these protests for the first time. you want them to be what you read about, and it takes some time to assert the empirical fact that they aren't, and try to figure out exactly why that is.