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Melissa C's avatar

Is it weird that reading people’s responses made me feel relieved? I share a lot of the same radicalizations and beliefs and I feel like lately all the news stories I see are overwhelmingly about those who want are in favor of radical preservation. I get why but it just makes me feel defeated, like all of these things we want for our country are nothing but pipe dreams. I know I’m not alone in how I feel and what I believe in, but it’s nice to have that reinforced nonetheless.

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Chris La Tray's avatar

Annie, I have been radicalized in so many ways. But thinking on this question, and rolling around with it a little bit during last night's bout of insomnia, I came away with this, even cheesy as it sounds: I have been radicalized for love. For how much I still love the world we live in. For how much I love everyone I share it with ... not just people (especially dreamy ones like you), but the winged and furred and clawed and flippered and proboscised and all of it. As ... *ahem* ... irritable as I often get with the choices we all make and how that reflects back on the world, I'm not ready to surrender my love yet. Which for me is a big deal, because I've spend more of my time in these five decades really trying to be a misanthrope and it just doesn't work for me.

I've come to realize I suck at close personal relationships; it's entirely possible that I'm not cut out for the reliance on technology that makes them seem to work for most people and it's too hurtful to me, I don't know. But this kind of arm's length, we're-all-in-this-together-so-let's-make-the-very-best-of-it-and-show-the-fuck-up-for-each-other kind of love? I'm all in. And that is a radical idea, at least for me.

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