Douglas County is a pretty “red” place, with mostly retirement-aged folks and country boys. I’m 22 and so far it’s just me and my mother who are members of the RCA here.
I was at lunch with my girlfriend’s parents and her nanna. Her family are all Jehovah’s Witnesses. My girlfriend mentioned I sold a newspaper, and I was terrified to talk about it because I wanted to make a good impression.
But when her nanna asked me about the paper, I explained that I was in a party, the Revolutionary Communists of America, and that we are organizing for a working-class government. To my surprise, everyone seemed to be neutral or even sympathetic! At one point the nanna said, “Yeah, something’s gotta change.”
We have to be old even with people you’d least expect to be sympathetic. Most people today aren’t as antagonistic to these ideas when they are broken down to an understandable level, and they don’t react as violently to the word communism as they used to.