This right here is my story. I started identifying as a communist when I was about 9 or 10 years old. My older brother was starting to hit puberty and had started hanging out a lot with this weird dude called Erik who, IIRC, was intelligent, had a weird mischievous kind of charisma, and a bit of a disturbing mind. Soon enough, my brother and Erik started talking a lot about communism and how good it was. I remember one time asking why communism didn't work out in the Soviet Union, and Erik explained: "See, communism is about taking money from everyone," he moved his hands over the floor, gathering up something invisible into a pile right in front of him, "and then distributing it evenly for everyone!" His hands moved back out, spreading out that invisible something in an evenly thick layer on the floor before him. "What happened in the Soviet Union is that some got more than others," his right hand rose just a little bit while his left sank a bit, showing that now this invisible layer was thicker on one side, thinner on the other. Blown away by this stellar demonstration of materialistic dialectics, I became a communist. I despised 'the USA' (what it exactly was that I despised was a bit hazy. Something about greed and money. And imperialism. And religion.) It would also turn out that communism was a perfect excuse to turn some of the things I was ashamed of into matters of pride. When many of my peers shopped their own clothes (or at least had a say in what to wear), my parents decided exactly what I would wear, which usually was cheaper clothes and lots of my brothers' old stuff. Thanks to CommunismTM , I could twist it into "rejecting fashion and consumerism" when it really was just a matter of my parents giving me less freedom than what my friends had. When all of my friends had pokémon cards and gameboys, I didn't, because my mom and my older brother had a weird but very violent hatred towards such "trends" and if I was ever seen with stuff like that they'd be sure to put me down and make me feel like a piece of ♥♥♥♥. But with CommunismTM , I could pretend that it was just me 'rejecting corporate exploitation of children with over-priced merchandise'. (Ironically, I was, and is, a huge LEGO fan.) It all took a darker turn one Tuesday in September, a few weeks after my 11th birthday. On my way home from French Horn practice, my mom told me that a plane had flown into a skyscraper in New York. Was it the World Trade Center towers? The ones that my oldest brother had visited and sent pictures from just a year earlier? She didn't remember, we turned on the radio in the car. Live reports straight from New York, one tower in World Trade Center on fire, was it an accident? Was it an act of terror? No one knew. By the time I got home, the second plane had hit the second tower. It was clear it was an act of terror. My brother, now 14 years old, was overjoyed and loved to display his glee in front of the whole family to provoke us. He'd do the clench his fist, curl his arm and repeat "YES! YES! YES!" Finally, someone had shown the filthy Americans their place. Around this time, my mother and Erik's parents had started talking a lot about what to do with their sons' clearly anti-social tendencies. Erik and my brother would sit in their rooms, discussing how to "exterminate all Americans" to rid the world of the influence of the dumbing, shallow, capitalistic American culture. Alarming things for any parent to hear their 13-year-olds say. I still thought of myself as a communist, but at that moment, I started realize that not only was there something wrong with my brother, there was also something just... Morally wrong with the violent sides of communism. For a few years, I identified as a "non-revolutionary Communist" (however that was supposed to work) until I finally gave up on Marx (which I have never read, btw) and became a neckbeard liberal/libertarian in my mid-teens. My brother would go on to make an epic and bizarre ideological trek from the farthest of the left, across liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, nationalism, to finally settle down in the land of National Socialism ("Nazism", for those of you who don't know), where he's currently made himself at home. He thinks he's different now, but to me he's all the same. When he was a Communist, he cheered the death of thousands of innocent Americans simply because they were American. Today, he wishes death to thousands of Jews, gays, women, Muslims, etc, etc, just for being what they are. It's all just the same. Purging, fighting, purging, fighting, it's the one-tracked mind of a fanatic, a militant. My mother's once staunch resistance to his disturbing ideological ideas has eroded from years and years of emotional warfare and terrorism from both sides. Nowadays she is content that she can hold a conversation with him without it escalating into a frothing shouting match of the most vulgar obscenities that could last for days on end. About his political ideas she now says "well we all have our opinions, don't we?" I am now 26, politically I'm circling the borderlands between liberalism and socialism. Am I a liberal social-democrat or a left-leaning socio-liberal? I don't know, either of the two I guess. There are very few around me in my age who are that close to the political middle as I am, most are farther to the right or the left. I have settled where I am mostly because I'm equally repelled by everything around me. Nationalism disgusts me, libertarianism makes me roll my eyes, pure socialism makes me irritated. I can't stop seeing what I think is the inhumane sides of them all, the inhumanity everyone unknowingly agrees upon as soon as they embrace an ideology and a utopia.