I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider - very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood.
The government in Havana is best understood as a cross between violent left-wing radicals and organized crime.
The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.
Soccer was my first love, and I enjoyed playing on the left wing until a groin injury forced me out of the game in 2008.
I was pulled out of school for every moratorium day and every rally for a left-wing candidate... from Ed Koch in his heyday to Eugene McCarthy. That's the culture that I came from.
As a left-wing campaigner for 35 years, I've been arrested on picket lines, led anti-imperialist demonstrations and spoken at anti-deportation protests outside police stations. I've made speeches at street rallies, in prisons and universities and at pubs.
I think a lot of things have become associated with the Right. For example, an unapologetic commitment to progress and modernity is now almost always associated with neo-conservatism whereas it traditionally used to be associated with left-wing thinking and moving society forward.
I have been left-wing always, from childhood.
I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.
It's ironic that socialism and similar left-wing ideas appeal to people who fashion themselves as 'anti-establishment,' when you can't have socialism without political repression.
