I was helping 
So with that introduction out of the way, I'll delve into what that title was supposed to remind me of.
Voting Age
Until I was old enough to vote I didn't pay a lot of attention to politics. I heard some of it of course as that is unavoidable and my parents watched the news nightly, so I too would see it from time to time. Back then it was not the 24/7 onslaught on our minds that it has become today. In fact, it was rare enough that the education system frequently assigned assignments to go to news papers, and periodicals and use some current events to tie to a speech or essay. For some students this was the only time they ever even looked at these things.
Back then and even today I was very much into being me. I did not really go out of my way to FIT IN. I dressed how I wanted, and I attempted to be the person I wanted to be. I would sometimes bump heads with cliques and I got to where I held such activities in a bit of contempt. I thought it was sad that people would worry about FITTING IN rather than finding out who they are, freeing that person, and finding out who their real friends are. You know, those people that like you for who you are rather than who you pretend to be? Well that was me.
I also had bought into this entire Republic idea that our government is run by our elected officials. Those elected officials are people that a population elects to REPRESENT them. In theory they are a person who will express the wishes and interests of those that elected them (aka constituents).
I was naive. I suspect most people were. It did not take long for me to have a lot of those "what the hell is going on" moments when I started paying attention to politics.
I was annoyed by the Republicans vs Democrats that seemed to be all that people talked about. That doesn't seem representative at all. In a truly representative government there should be a wide array of representatives as different regions of people will have different interests and different ideas.
The idea of Democracy was something I still believed in back then. It made a lot of sense to me that if the representatives truly represented their constituents that all these different ideas would contribute to a greater whole. The variance in the way people thought increased the chances of coming up with many different approaches and thus, increases the probabilities of finding a good solution, or path forward.
The Republican vs Democrats rhetoric and practice destroyed that daydream of mine. That distilled your representatives down to two kinds of people. It was very much like two high school cliques being given the power to dictate what happens to everyone in that high school.
This was an angering thought.
It got worse as I gradually woke to some realities. I remember when Bob Dole ran for president. I was old enough to vote then and I was paying attention. He gave this really bad speech. Everyone was talking about it. They were talking about how stupid he was. Six months later he gave a speech and the same people were praising him. Yet, he had said things that contradicted his first speech. Don't they see it? "Hey guys, why are you happy about that speech?" I looked around. That was my first experiences in realizing that the majority of the population doesn't bother to THINK that much about these elections. They do not truly consider the importance of these things. The short term memory is all they care about. They will make their decisions off of whomever they like the most in news, celebrities, etc telling them to endorse someone, and based upon ONLY the most recent information they have been exposed to.
I thought this was insane. I kind of washed my hands of the process for awhile. Yet, I do remember being exasperated by what I perceived as mass stupidity.
Early Politics
Now as I later would become much more politically involved though not really identifying with any party I actually considered running for a county commissioner once simply because the lady that was running for my district told me she didn't have time to do much in terms of the commissioner position as she had a business to run. So she was going to be a commissioner so she could show up at a weekly meeting or two and make decisions, and the rest of the time she was going to run her retail shop business. That seemed off to me. So I considered for awhile running against her. I decided not to.
She won. She and the other commissioners collected a pay check and pretty much let the county administrator (corrupt) do whatever he wanted to do.
Years later it was coming up again and someone was running against her for commissioner. He was someone like myself that had worked closely with the county administrator on many occasions and knew about some skeletons in the closet. My wife and I decided we would endorse him.
Yet to vote in the primary to get him in we had to register as Republicans. My wife and I went to do that and vote. He was running against that lady who just got paid a check for doing nothing other than rubber stamping whatever the county administrator (not an elected position) wanted.
The vote ended up a tie. They drew a name from a hat, and she won again.
Then speaking to my wife she said he wasn't on her ballot. It turns out my wife had registered as a Democrat. Her one vote was the difference between him winning and losing.
Neither of us cared about party and we only did it so we could vote for him.
That was pretty much it for me and politics for awhile. Though I remained registered as a Republican simply due to not really having any reason not to be. It didn't influence me in one way or another at that point.
Ron Paul
Then I encountered Ron Paul. I don't remember what video I watched or articles I read at this point as that was some time ago and I've seen and read so many since then. I do recall thinking a lot of his ideas were nuts. I mean who in their right mind will talk about abolishing the IRS, or the department of education? Our country cannot run without those things (or so I briefly thought). Though I did my due diligence and I actually researched these insane things.
Wait a minute... The Department of Education didn't even exist until the mid-1980s? The country educated some great minds and had functional education prior to that. Maybe it isn't nuts, as the education system was starting to seem to be problematic back then and it has become far more so since then.
Wait a minute... Prior to 1913 there was no IRS or income tax, yet somehow the government had functioned without it for over 100 years? Great inventions and growth happened. There was no IRS, there was no income tax. Yet it worked. Maybe that isn't so crazy after all. Furthermore I learned that the type of taxation that the income tax represents was expressly forbidden by the Constitution. It only continues due to an amendment and even getting that through proved tricky. They created the IRS and the income tax and operated it for quite some time without proper ratification. Some people will argue it never was properly ratified.
I started paying attention to Ron Paul. I watched and read things from him going back a long time. I didn't always agree with some of his opinions, but I realized he was a strict Constitutionalist and he did not flip flop. He had been saying the same thing for decades even in the face of ridicule. I had never seen any politician like him.
I once attended a rally in 2007 or 2008 where he spoke. I felt tears come unbidden to my eyes several times as I heard him speak. It was evoked by hearing someone speak in ways I had never thought I'd hear anyone speak. I was moved.
So moved in fact that I voted in the Republican Primaries for him and I became a delegate in 2008 though I had no clue what a delegate really does. That was a learning experience.
I only went to one event where I voted on some other things that year. Ron Paul dropped out of the race, and I was left looking for someone to vote for. I bought into the Obama speeches. In particular for me were things like ending the Patriot Act which Obama trashed extensively on the campaign trail. That was perhaps my number one reason for voting for him, though there were a few others.
He won. Then he proceeded to strengthen and extend the patriot act and EVERY reason I voted for him he did exactly the opposite of what he said on the campaign trail. I said he either lied, or he was taken to the woodshed. Yet, I swore at that time I'd no longer do the lesser of two evils.
In 2012 I was a delegate for Ron Paul again. This time I attended bi-weekly meetings of other Ron Paul supporting delegates and we were extremely organized and extremely dedicated. I went all the way through the process including the state convention and only stopping short of going to the RNC (Republic National Convention) yet I did make sure that I helped get far more Ron Paul supporters there than the established GOP liked.
I saw and learned a lot in the process. I saw the established chair people apply rules when convenient and ignore them when not convenient. I saw people print forgeries of pamphlets with names people were recommending for votes get replaced by others. In other words we show up at the Colorado State Republican Convention and their is a stadium full of thousands of chairs. As you went to your section and chair there would be a lot of pamphlets on them.
These pamphlets would represent certain interests and be known to people. Among these were pamphlets aimed at getting delegates for Ron Paul and otherwise Libertarian leaning people into office. It was one of these pamphlets we watched people coming around and grabbing the pamphlet and replacing it with a forgery. The forgery was close in appearance, but not exact, but it had a very different set of names.
As part of this process delegates must become very familiar with Robert's Rules for how to behave, how votes work, what votes require majority, which require 2/3rds, etc. At our bi-weekly meetings we quizzed and practiced extensively to be well versed in this. We knew from 2008 that they would use this to try to stop us. So we learned the RULES better than almost anyone.
That didn't matter. Across the nation you would hear of cases where they violated or ignored the rules to stop the Ron Paul people, or they imposed them when convenient.
I considered myself libertarian leaning at that time. Yet we realized that the system is rigged for two parties. So without fighting from within these parties there was no chance of anything changing.
At the RNC that year there was a vote called that required 2/3rds. The shouts of Ayes and Nays were heard and it wasn't clear. In such a case the rules require a physical count by show of hands. They did not do this. They instead said "the ayes have it" and this particular rule they wanted to pass would make it more difficult for a grass roots movement like the Ron Paul one to be as successful as it was that year. Yet, it get's worse. Someone was videoing the teleprompter with their cell phone at the time. "The ayes have it" was on the teleprompter before the vote was even over.
As I understand it a similar event is said to have happened at the DNC that year.
Left and Right
In talking on the internet during many phases of this I was called RIGHT many times and LEFT many times. In some reddit threads I had each of those labels applied to me at some point.
I considered the entire left and right paradigm a sham.
I was and am an individual.
I considered that entire mentality to be the shackles by which the masters control us. They pit us against each other as an US against THEM type game. HOME vs VISITOR. I began to see how we are conditioned most of our lives into viewing the world that way in some sick form of false dichotomy. We are herded into corals and told that we can only go left or right, and we are treated as though once we choose a direction then we are forever left or forever right.
This is stupidity. This is lazy. This is propaganda.
Sadly people seem to buy into it. That leads to a problem.
Current Days
Well it appears that the early Communist Terrorists known as The Weathermen were geniuses. They stopped bombing for protest and instead went into the education system. This is no joke. This happened. We have since that time had a vast increase in the amount of communist and socialist teachings within the Department of Education lead education system.
This has produced a very real divide that was mostly fabricated B.S. prior to that.
It defined a type of left that was steeped in communist and socialist propaganda and drilled in the use of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals". Among these are ridicule your enemy, and project your own actions onto your opponent as though they did them.
These tactics are blatant all over the mainstream media these days.
These tactics are blatant in the mindless chanting and the refusal to discuss.
The left tended to be about LIBERTY and doing what you wanted to do as long as it didn't hurt anyone else in the past. This is why they called it progressive.
The right was more about fiscal responsibility and trying to maintain tradition.
The keyword there is WAS.
The right changed a lot when it was overrun by the neo-conservatives with the rise of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Yet I personally believe the neo-cons also infested the Democratic party. People like Hillary and Obama were great at pushing the Neo-Con agenda which was clearly laid out in "Project for a New American Century" AKA PNACs own writings. This also explained why to me Obama seemed like Bush 2.0. I didn't see changes (which Obama ran on). I saw extensions of the plans that had already been in motion.
Today there are still people that are individuals that lean possibly a left or right in the old sense of the meaning. I was an individual I neither was right nor left.
Today I would be squarely in the new version of the RIGHT leaning. Not because I want to. Not because of ideological agreement. It is simply because the LEFT is where I see people talking about tolerance and liberty while destroying history, protesting free speech, and embracing hypocrisy on an unprecedented level. What they do makes total sense if you are familiar with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and it makes more sense when you consider Hillary Clinton's mentor was Saul Alinsky.
I dislike the existence of left, and right.
I dislike the existence of Democrat, Republican, and the party system at all. I am an individual. I want to be represented either by myself or an INDIVIDUAL who mostly shares my interests. I am never going to get that as long as they have us convinced there are only TWO types of people in the world.
I am against the new left primarly due to them being by their ACTIONS against everything they claim to support. They have attacked history. They are following the playbook recommended by Communist overthrows. Historically those have been horrible and resulted in far more death than the Hitler and Nazi Holocaust. Yet, that is brushed under the rug.
There is a reason the formerly communist countries are resisting so many of the new mandates from the European Union. They've been down that path before. They know where it leads. They learn from history.
The problem is that some of us that do know history are surrounded by those that do not. Furthermore they are buying into appeals to authority from their communist/socialist leaning professors and they come out of their education thinking they "have the answers" when really they know very little, and as long as they insist on stopping the free speech of those who believe different from them they are doomed to be stagnant minds that don't learn. You can't learn much in an echo chamber. Most learning comes from exposure to new ideas, perspectives, and experiences.
I dislike left, and right. I dislike false dichotomies. I am an individual.
Yet, I realize the world is doing it's damnedest to shove me into a box.