Who was the most influential person who helped shape your politics to this day?

[Prophet 451]

26. My Grimmer (grandmother)

Because my parents were being all dysfunctional, my grandmother raised me. She spent her whole adult life caring for disabled and disturbed children. First as a nurse. Then she ran a children's home and then the local council (I'm British, btw) gave her this big old Victorian house and she filled it with disabled and disadvantaged foster kids. Now, I know foster parents often get a bad rap but when Grimmer died, we managed to track down a couple dozen of the kids who had passed through her care and they all remembered her with fondness.

You're probably wondering how all this shaped my politics. Well, it was her example that shaped my politics. She devoted everything to helping those kids, kids that most people had given up on. The money that the council provided for raising each kid, that was always shrinking and never enough but I never heard her complain, not for herself. Oh, she complained bitterly about the council cutting money from her kids, taking away from what she could do for them but never for herself. She was a Christian (I'm not, for what it's worth) who actually took the teachings to heart. She very rarely spoke about her faith but tried to live the teachings about love and compassion and caring for the least fortunate.

And really, that's what made me a liberal. The idea that us, our society, have a duty to care for those left behind by society. Not just the kids in need of someone to look after them but everyone who's been ignored and forgotten. That's what I hear from conservative politicians, that they're fine with some human wastage if it saves money and I wasn't raised that way.