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Thanks for sharing about your mum. Really interesting and powerful. I despair about my boomer liberal once-upon -a-time radical mother, despite the fact that she is great too. she says all the right things but will consistently flinch when it comes standing up to rather than propping up forms of power that are polite, and have an air of calm authority but who are ultimately self serving. She wants all baddies to look and behave like thuggish twats such as the driving offences woman upthread or, indeed, our PM; she wants all change to take place through discussion amongst ‘sensible’ people speaking a certain kind of language in elite institutions and wants it to be on a level which she feels like she can own. Others will say now is the time for grass roots direct action, a focus on the local, about the politics of community, of youth. Ashamedly, I have inherited some of my mum’s bourgeois instincts, despite working hard to shake them off and despite losing much of the privilege she enjoys/enjoyed. Ashamedly also, I don’t spend enough time in protests, occupations and so on. My weak position is that i pin some hope in the youth and in demographic shifts, I’m unendingly impressed by my students, and those in the community in which i live, i just hope they don’t get hoodwinked by the all-too-reasonable-seeming types that, for example, agreed with everything in corbyn’s manifesto but quibbled because of the lure of the status quo. that’s so much about what i despise, quibbling when there’s a chance to change and complaining the rest of the time. I’m minded of those, some of my friends included, who voted weakly in the 2010 election, effectively voting in the tories and leading us into this mess, their actions are as misguided, to my mind, as those who voted brexit in 2016, but we vilify one cohort more because of perceived norms and social prejudices. rant over