Clementine

Please excuse my absence, I've been a little bit busy.

One thing younger people with radical political and religious positions hear sometimes is, "When you're older, you'll change." My parents were fond of saying, "When you have children of your own, you'll understand." I think the idea is that stability is more important once you're invested in the system. When you have more to lose, you might want to lose it less. I don't think I got the message.

I'm only a week and a half into fatherhood, but if anything it has solidified my political and (anti-)religious beliefs. I now have an actual person in my arms that will inherit the future we give her, and I want desperately for it to be a good one. So far from making me settle down to accept the status quo as inevitable and try to fit her into it, I am more driven than ever to be politically active.

I want my daughter to grow up seeing her parents working to change things that are wrong. I want her to know from the beginning that you don't just have to settle for how the world is. Despite my views, I have been slow to get involved in many local protests and actions. Now I want not only to be more involved, I want my daughter to be right there with me holding the signs, listening to the speeches, passing out the leaflets, being educated and educating and living the revolution in the present.

I don't mind if my daughter wants tattoos and piercings and listens to music I find intolerable. Maybe her way of rebelling one day will be to believe in god, to eat meat, to scold an aborting mother, to buy a Hummer. Who knows? They're her choices to make. But my daughter will not grow up learning from her parents that those things are right and good or even acceptable. My daughter will be able to make those choices informed that there is another way if she wants it.

At the very least, she'll know more about government and economics than her social studies teachers ever will.