Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Words from MySpace - Political journey

Politics.

My parents are liberal, even though they're hard-core working class.
Growing up I judged politicians and parties by the appearance of their leaders. I didn't like Palme at first simply because I didn't like his nose. I liked this other guy more, he laughed allot.

Olof Palme


Then Olof Palme went and got shot. For any possible reader of this who's not that familiar whit Swedish history, modern Swedish history, huhm...

Sweden in general... We had a our minister of state shot and killed on an open street, back in 1986 and it's like JFK-murder, nobody knows who did it (one could probably found heaps of information about this on wikipedia, al es usual)...

I cried when he died. I was a very weary child who worried way too much about people dying, going away never to come back.


Anyway after that... for many, many years I didn't have any political views what so ever.
I spent much of 1994 listening to my 2 best friends arguing about politics, he was liberal/blue, she was left-winged.
After giving it a long hard thought I came to the conclusion that I'm more left than right.

By tradition Sweden is a social democratic country. 80% of the 1900 was under social-democratic ruler ship. The perfect Sweden aimed to be one of "folkhemmet" (the home of the people) and solidarity - a safe country where people stood up for each other and the right thing, helped the poor etc. That's why we pay so much in tax.
(Older people I meet sometimes say "we used to talk about solidarity, but we don't anymore, do we?".)

I am still not liberal.
I wouldn't say I'm a lefty.
I'm desperately searching for something new and the story goes, I've voted for the Swedish environmental-party during the last 2 elections.

My crowd consists of mostly blue smurfs who regards their freedom higher than anything. And when talking to them I'm trying to explain that it's not that I'm all for a country ruled by a strong state, against freedom and high taxes.
It simply comes down to this:
- I love freedom, I want people develop themselves anyway, and as far as they possibly want.
- But society is not a cake for everyone to dig into equally.

Hence, when anyone provides med with the solution to the chore-problem of society (according to me), when all men and females, black and white gets an equal chance to flower, then I'm politically theirs hole-hearted.