Has reading about political/leftist history ever upset/angered you?

[ContrarianLemming]

Has reading about political/leftist history ever upset/angered you?

I ask because today I was reading the Anarchist FAQ and reading about the first generation of workers who lived in modern capitalism, about how they knew it for what it was (not like modern workers who are used to it) about how the instinctivly knew it was wrong, about how they fought against it, how the first syndicalist unions were created and crushed, and with this born the socialist movement as it is today. It really touched me, and angered me.

People today, they just "I hate my job, but I gotta do it, that's the way of things" if they were only as wise as their ancestors who provided there own goods and worked there own farms without enclosures and armed themselves against the first corporations. If only people today could have as much class consciousness.

Does it ever get to you like that? because I can't seem to stop thinking about it.

Solidarity.
CL

[Stand Your Ground]

All the time. I can't stand how people just go along with whatever is in place, they don't try to challenge it.

[Taikand]

I feel like I'm surrounded by idiots.So, yeah, I get very angry at times to the point in which I'm beating someone.

[Bubbles]

When I first learn about the concentration camps for communists in Sweden I was very upset.

[Barry Lyndon]

All the time. And I'm a history major in college, so I'm moody a lot.

When I was reading about the Haymarket riot, I got emotional reading the lyrics of a song by the workers who marched(and in some cases, died) for the 8-hour work day:

"We want to feel the sunshine
And we want to smell the flow'rs
We are sure that God has willed it
And we mean to have eight hours"

Thinking about how many people in this country still work ridiculously long hours to survive, to say nothing of Third World sweatshops, 100 years later, disgusts and infuriates me to no end. Those lines sum up how capitalism robs people of the enjoyment of life itself, for no other reason then the class they were born into.

I also have a book called 'The Black Panthers Speak'(a collection of the speeches of Fred Hampton, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale)- this one is particularly upsetting to me because I live on the South Side of Chicago, and every day I see the black ghetto continue to decay in large part because it was robbed of the leadership it needed by the fucking FBI and Mayor Daley's pigs.

'It is man's most hateful torment to have knowledge of everything and mastery over nothing'-Herodotus

[FreeFocus]

History overall really pisses me off, just not leftist history. The ethnic cleansing of the Americas, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, the failures of the left, all of it is just very unfortunate. Even looking back at the 1960s and 70s, what a time of tremendous potential - it wasn't in vain, because those struggles made for a better society, but what could have been wasn't actualized.

[BuddhaInBabylon]

I'm irate most of the time....i wake up thinking about and considering different aspects of our modern situation....the situation that history has led up to. And i typically go to bed with some sort of discontent in my heart because of all the things i would like to do to change the state of things that would land me in jail or worse...
so i seek out the middle somewhere.

[Pretty Flaco]

When i read about history, I usually end up thinking about the future... And how it can be made.