when did your political awakening happen?

[llmart]

27. Somewhere around my senior year in high school.

My American Government teacher was a bit outside the mainstream of the little rural, all-white town I grew up in, and he taught the class about propaganda and how our own government wasn't on the up and up about the Viet Nam war. There were a couple of guys in my class who didn't take school or grades very seriously - they were the popular jocks - and one day he got angry at them for not paying attention and he said, "You're the kind of guys that are going to get dragged over to fight this awful war because you'll never have good enough grades to get into college." I subscribed to US News and World Report when I was 16 - used the money I'd made that summer to pay for the subscription. Other girls were getting "Teen" magazine or whatever, but I wanted to go to college and I wanted to better understand politics. Reading that magazine taught me all I needed to know about Nixon, and his dirty tricks cemented in my mind the fact that I felt more comfortable in the Democratic Party. I've never voted for a Republican in my life and I'm proud of that!

My parents talked a lot about politics and there were always several newspapers in our house, but they weren't voters. Maybe they were before I became old enough to be aware, but I don't remember them ever talking about voting. They were both extremely devastated when JFK was assassinated. Their beliefs were definitely along the lines of the Democrats though. My father was a blue collar union guy.