Mine was wearing that communist “party” shirt with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro* all partying to high school
Edited- Castro for Kim Il-Sung
First communist-y moment: I remember asking my parents why people use money instead of just working together, and they told me "they tried doing that in Russia and it didn't work because the doctors won't work hard if they weren't being paid". I'm sure they weren't planning on having to defend capitalism before explaining where babies come from from their kid, but what a bad explanation...
Hilariously, Soviet doctors were amongst the best in the world, just as Cuban ones are now.
Also, the doctors were still paid! The USSR always used money? Why would they lie to a child!?
When I was in high school, I remember I was walking down the street with my girlfriend while we were both snacking from a box of curly fries, when suddenly this stranger behind us just reaches inside and grabs one without asking. I turned around to get a look at the guy, and it was Communism, in the flesh. He smirked at me and said "no one will ever believe you" before disappearing around the corner.
I was alive for the last decade of the USSR.
Yes, I'm an old fart.
Damn kids and your heckin malarkey
Back in my day, hgdrrrrrbbblllldggsssshhhhhgdgd
I mean, I was 7 years old at the time, so I'm pretty sure I was too busy crashing my BMX bike into random objects to pay attention.
So you're 4 years younger than me, and you're calling me old?
Listen, you dog faced pony soldier
Lol, I was going off the Madonna timeline here. Papa Don't Preach was released in '86, and Vogue was released in '90 (according to gabagoogle).
Madonna me, gabagool
In 2015 my favorite grandpa, who lived in a rural part of a deep red state told me I needed to get on that phone of mine and look up this senator from Vermont because he’ll make a great president, only thing is he calls himself a “democratic socialist”. And then proceeded to make the case for socialism and mock conservative people around us who were against it without knowing what it is. Great man... I’m just sad he passed away during the trump administration before he got to see what this new left movement could grow into.
There was a communist kid in middle school that I was friends with. He ended up skipping a bunch of grades and neither of us were great in social situations at the time (he had aspergers and I was an asshole) so we just sort of stopped hanging out. He's probably here now that I think about it.
Once more, Uncle Ho proves that he's not afraid to go toe to toe with somebody much taller than him.
First: In first grade I asked my dad why we couldn't just share our money with my poorer classmates and he said it was because that's communism and it's bad.
Second: I got in an argument with a girl in my middle school because I said Che was a murderer. I read it in an AIM chat room and just went with it... I was a dumb kid but I was really cute so people put up with me.
Third: In high school there was this kid who everyone knew as the communist and he wore the shirt you're referencing in the OP. He invited me to an illicit game of capture the flag at the governor's mansion and we protected our Soviet flag while trying to capture the black flag that the local anarchist group had brought. Just some friendly leftist in-fighting.
Edit: also Command and Conquer: Red Alert 1, 2 and Yuri's Revenge.
Reading picture books on space at age 4 and seeing Gagarin's grinning face and the beautiful curves of the R7 rocket.
Dad was Socialist, of the reformist "Union man." kind. Never had super sophisticated politics, but always stood up for workers and shouted down the anti-immigrant types.
My babysitter when I was about age 3-5 was an older Russian Jewish woman who had been a scientist back in the USSR. She and her husband left due to a spike in antisemitism after 1991. I figured when I was pretty young that Communism couldn’t be that bad if my “other parents“ came from there. My older sibling actually spoke a bit of Russian by the time we left [redacted].
Funnily enough, she did sometimes forcefeed me, which I attribute to her being old enough to remember the Great Patriotic War.
Funnily enough, she did sometimes forcefeed me, which I attribute to her being old enough to remember the Great Patriotic War.
My grandma often tried to force feed me, and it's pretty much a stereotype for all grandmas, especially the ones who lived through WWII. There's also lots of people who lived through it who got obese because they always tried to eat as much as was available every time they ate because that's what they learned to do during and after the German occupation here. So yeah, it probably does have something to do with that.
My grandma used to tell me about how one of her earliest memories was when Nazis got into their house looking to arrest her dad for striking. She started crying and one of the soldiers started awkwardly patting her head to comfort her. A few years later I was on a school trip in a site where the Nazis used to imprison people that is now a museum and the guide told us "in this room they imprisoned the bus and tram drivers of [x] for striking" and I was like holy shit, that's where they kept my great-grandpa, it was pretty unexpected. Many people had scratched their names on the wall, I didn't have time to look for his but maybe I will some time if I'm passing by.
Thinking back my first interactions with Marxist notions were Rage Against the Machine albums and I couldn't have been older than 14. I think sometime after that I read the Manifesto.
I dimly remember calling the kindergarden ladies "comrade" and then being told to stop after the fall of the regime. Also the "democracy protests" going on at the time, though I didn't understand the implications at all.
