When I was 17, my parents cautioned me not to pursue a career in the arts — lots and lots of dire, strong warnings because I had been continually writing poetry and essays since the third grade (which is when I first learned what ‘poems’ and ‘essays’ were). I’d been recording original songs since I was 12, and my two best friends from high school had the unfortunate experience of witnessing teenage me exploring all manner of creative expression. Indulging these creative compulsions was fine, my parents thought — but just “do it in your free time,” you know.

Dutifully at the age of 18, I arrived at the University of California, Davis as an “Environmental Policy” major. When I arrived at UC Davis (late 2011), the Occupy movement — a protest movement vaguely against capitalism, characterized by folks creating mass tent cities — was in full swing all around the world. As if on cue right at the start of the school year, the University of California Board of Regents announced a public proposal to hike tuition. Students all across the University of California started creating Occupy tent encampments. At UC Davis, we built our encampment on our quad. I joined this encampment, and a few days later we woke up to a phalanx of 40 riot cops marching toward us. We sat down and linked arms. The cops maced us in a spectacular cloud of orange, then threw us in jail. A video of the cops macing us went viral, and that police attack eventually became a meme now known on Wikipedia as the “UC Davis pepper-spray incident.” (In 2011, “viral videos” didn’t occur as continually as they do now. TikTok and Instagram Reels did not exist yet, and so viral videos used to hold much more cultural weight.)

The police attack and the subsequent mass media attention the attack inspired were extremely traumatic — at the time. But the attack was a long time ago — more than a decade. The truth is, I have re-framed the attack in my mind so many times that I have no true idea if the attack is what first inspired my political rage, if my already-existing political rage is what led me to sit in front of the cops in the first place, if I was just in a nihilistic place of rage and then decided post-hoc to turn that nihilism into political action, if my political awakening was a mixture of these possibilities, or if my political awakening was something else entirely, etc. What I know is, I soon became obsessed with socialist politics.

I thought about socialist politics nonstop. I researched socialist politics nonstop. I was engaged in socialist student activism nonstop, spending most of my freetime trying to build a campus chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America with my young socialist friends. Soon, I found myself serving as the Young Democratic Socialists’ “Western Regional Organizer,” helping students create YDS chapters all along the West Coast.

At the age of 19, again — not despite but because of my obsession — my parents warned me to stop with my compulsions around socialist politics. Admittedly, my fanaticism around socialism was quite neurotic — really moreso, my parents were worried that me spending my college years obsessing about socialism would make me fundamentally unemployable.

It’s true that I did eventually end up dropping out of college… to take a job offer as a union organizer.

What’s ironic is that — somehow, and I do mean “somehow” — I’ve become fortunate enough to turn both my creative and socialist compulsions into a fulfilling, sustainable life.

In total, I spent 10 years as an external union organizer, having helped thousands of non-union workers run campaigns to form unions. Today, I work in union communications and own a successful small political media business. In fact — as I type this — I’m in a hotel room in Havana, Cuba. I’m directing a left-wing documentary titled “In the Name of Terror,” and in the morning I will be filming a one-million person march — Cuba’s International Workers’ Day March — to help make the point that USA’s capitalist imperialism is bad and the ideal of socialism is good.

Not a day goes by that I don’t contemplate the absurdity that I’ve turned what at the time was an obscure obsession with socialism — in 2011, the word “socialism” was still a dirty word you dare-not-speak — into a profitable, deeply meaningful career. In some ways, being so deeply engaged with the Democratic Socialists of America as a young adult has become the most profitable decision of my life. (Was it a decision?) Not only does my career allow me to express my political feelings honestly and profitably, but my career also utilizes my creative compulsions for what I see as political good.

I don’t know that I deserve any of this — and I mean that to my core. Recently, my ability to live my political truth and do so profitably feels so obscene to me. I started my political journey in an Occupy tent encampment. As I type this, there are thousands of young students setting up tent encampments within their Universities to protest the current genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli government. Where will all these kids be in a decade-plus?

Much of my parents’ fear around my obsessions with creativity and socialist politics was rooted in the practicality of their upbringing. Both my parents immigrated to the USA because in Hong Kong, they were dirt poor — the type of poor that most citizens of the USA don’t understand. In the USA, the poor are disproportionately obese. In the countryside of Hong Kong, the poor are sickly skinny — and much shorter than they would be if they had been fed sufficient levels of calories.

I mentioned that my upcoming documentary “In the Name of Terror” criticizes USA’s capitalist imperialism. Part of why I feel that my current existence feels obscene is that — by at least some measures, the totally fictional and violent fabrication that is the ‘American Dream’ apparently worked, at least for this kid of my poor immigrant parents.

***

At the top of this essay, I wrote that “my two best friends from high school had the unfortunate experience of witnessing teenage me exploring all manner of creative expression.” Indeed, it’s true: I don’t like things. I love things — I obsess about the things I love.

In the early 2010s, emo music was in the mainstream (e.g., Simple Plan, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Panic at the Disco, etc.). Less well known — except to those who truly went down the emo rabbit hole — was “scramz.” The term was originally coined as a joke to distinguish between fake screamo (e.g., Hawthorne Heights, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, etc.) and “real screamo,” i.e., scramz (e.g., Heroin, Antioch Arrow, etc.). The underlying wink of the term eventually disappeared, and as bands continued to iterate and iterate on the term, “scramz” has since become an un-ironic descriptor that people sincerely self-identify with.

If you would like to understand the difference between fake screamo and scramz, put it this way: when Taking Back Sunday sings, “The truth is you could slit my throat / And with my one last gasping breath / I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt,” there’s a deep sense of theatricality to it. It’s ultimately a performance — and the vast majority of people read Taking Back Sunday as such. Contrast Taking Back Sunday’s theatricality with Black Sheep Wall, as Black Sheep Wall sings, “I’m sorry, Dan / I’m doing what I can / We let you down again / F*ck this band.” That’s not theatricality. That’s just depression, and perhaps lethal depression.

On the one hand, the existence of scramz as a small, niche community is a good thing. Scramz provides people who don’t otherwise fit in or have an outlet for their potentially dangerous feelings a space to feel seen and heard. On the other hand, the community of scramz is rooted in deep pain and hurt. Within the larger emo subculture, scramz has sometimes been referred to as “male manipulator music.” It’s not difficult to make the connections and draw conclusions here. There are certainly those within the scramz community who were once toxic individuals but who — through therapy and proper medication — eventually become very decent people. Sam McPheeters of Born Against is a good example of that. But scramz has also existed long enough for those in the larger emo subculture to observe its participants age into their thirties. For those who are too into scramz for too long, there lies a path of unhealthy relationships, drug addiction, deep depression, loneliness, and self-harm. And while scramz might once serve as a healthy outlet for those deep in depression to finally feel seen, perhaps scramz can also in the long-term become a destructive force on its own — instructing its listeners to cycle deeper and deeper in depressive thought spirals.

Anyway, my apologies — I realize now I’ve written nearly 500 words on scramz.

Let me get to the point: Sam McPheeters made it out alive of the scramz community. There are times when I deeply relate with his story. The deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing, the type of folks who make in-real-life Leftwing radical political action their entire identity: I don’t think it’s controversial to say that there are lots of folks who are hurting in deep and profound ways there.

On the one hand, the existence of the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing as a small, niche community is a good thing. The deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing provide people who don’t otherwise fit in or have an outlet for their potentially dangerous feelings a space to feel seen and heard. On the other hand, the community of the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing is rooted in deep pain and hurt… But the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing have also existed long enough for those in the larger progressive subculture to observe its participants age into their thirties. For those who are too into the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing for too long… etc., etc., etc.

One of my closest friends I met through the Young Democratic Socialists of America is now in her mid-thirties. She has never held a job for longer than six months. I’ve witnessed her attempt to end her life. She has an abusive boyfriend who has sexually assaulted multiple women. She is depressed and isolated as she has been extremely verbally violent to nearly everyone she is close with. She is an alcoholic who used to beat her ex-husband. And while she is an extreme example of the pain of the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing, now that the cohort of people I grew up with within the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing are all now well into their 30s — some into their 40s — I’ve just seen how this story plays out. There are indeed lots and lots of exceptions, but many, many of the young folks who I grew up within the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing are not doing well in life.

Who am I to have made a fulfilling career out of Leftwing politics? It’s obscene — and also, what am I to do about it?

***

More and more, I interact with professional political consultants, especially as I delve deeper into my political communications & media career.

When I was 18, I thought that professional political consultants were overconfident fakes who knew a lot less than they pretended to know. Now that I am 30, I know for a fact that my intuition was spot on. While there are notable exceptions, most professional political consultants are simply professionally confident people who say what they need to say and become friends with whomever they need to befriend to continue cashing large checks.

Yet, the professional consultant class does gatekeep a lot of change within the system — this broken system that the deepest pockets of radical Leftwing organizing are so profoundly correct to be angry at.

Ultimately, the system needs to be overthrown. We all know that.

But how?

***

In a recent interview with Piers Morgan, philosopher Slavoj Zizek described himself as a “moderately conservative communist.”

That hit a little too close to home.