Seed of liberalism

I’ve shared this story with close family a few times, recently, & thought it’d be cool to blog.

During childhood, my grandparents (who had large part in rearing me) used to travel about an hour to a flea market on weekends to set up & sell things for cash. My grandfather was an electrician and would fix things up to sell, along with various other home goods. They’d wake me up around 5am to get going (ugh). We lived in the Deep South and by middle school, I was already a major bookworm b/c I’d observed how backwards much of the culture was/is. Most folks are very conservative, decidedly on the right side of political spectrum. One weekend following a New Year’s Eve celebration (I was, perhaps, b/w 7-10 years old), we traveled to the flea market and set up our stand as usual. I recall a neighbor at a table across the row from ours.. someone asked if she’d watched the ball drop on TV & she answered with an indignant rant about how much money must have been wasted and how many hungry ppl could be fed if our society had it’s priorities right.

Despite having long forgotten her name and face, I remember recapitulating her rant several times as I grew older. It amazed me to hear such a progressive stance, relative to most folks I’d heard. It is as if she was a good tune amid lots of chaotic noise.. and this random flea market neighbor of my childhood planted the seed of liberal ideology into my young head. She probably doesn’t even know it, but this was a significant evolution of my socio-political awareness. From liberalism I later moved to libertarianism and then to anarchism where I reside, presently.