No, I'm not the daugther of a famous governor and my grandparents haven't had place in the Senate, but still I can say I've quite a political family. They just were active members of political parties and apparently have passed their progressive, left-wing ideas on to me.
My great-grandparents (at least my great-grandmother) were active SDAP members. The SDAP is the former name of the PvdA (Labour Party). It was in the late 40s and 50s when the SDAP was more socialistic than the PvdA is now. It was an SDAP member of Lower House who in 1918 had called for revolution (taking Russia for an example) and thirty years later the party still had a more left-wing ideology than it has now. Right now the PvdA namely is a little bit left from the centre and somewhat like the English Labour Party, or maybe a bit more leftist. I don't know any U.S. party that's like the PvdA.
In 1956, my great-grandmother co-ordinated the relief of Hungarian refugees in her hometown Schiedam, so she was way not communistic I suppose.
My mother has been an active member of the PPR (Political Party of Radicals), which was a somewhat socialistic, left-wing party which now is part of Groen Links. However, she left the party after a conflict within the party, I don't know what it was about. Actually, she wanted to join the PSP (Pacifist Socialist Party), but she joined the CPN (Communist Party of the Netherlands), of which my Dad also was a member. They were pretty active in their hometown Maassluis. The CPN for clarity's sake was not a part of the Soviet communist party and eventually had disapproved the invasion in Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, there still were quite a few Stalinistic people in the CPN, whom my parents often argued with. My parents supported an organisation called "Voor een linkse doorbraak", which wanted the CPN, PPR and PSP to incorporate. Hower, it took my parents too long so they left the party. A few years later the three parties eventually formed Groen Links.
I was sort of raised with news and politics. At four years old, I listened to the radio during Gulf War I, thinking Iran, Iraq and Kuwait together formed Ukraine *LOL*. At seven I knew some of the ministers in the government and at eight I remember my father explaining to me why the new government was called "purple": the socialist/social-democratic (PvdA) colour was red and the VVD (conservatives) colour was blue, so as they formed a government that was called "purple".
But I didn't think of actively participating in a political party till September of 2001. It was shortly after 9/11 and Bush was planning to attack Afghanistan. As you might guess, I was totally against that war. I planned to go to a peace demonstration in Amsterdam, but eventually didn't go. Some months passed by, until I got Internet and started looking at the site of the SP. I'd let my sister look up thigns for me before, but my plans to join the party stayed plans. On July 5th, 2002 I for the first time went to a meeting held by the youth organisation of the SP, and I joined the party in October. For a short time I'd been a candidate for a position on the board of the Apeldoorn branch of the SP, but I'd concluded I'd too little experience for it and I don't know what happened to the established Apeldoorn branch after that. I surely should ask if we're still trying to form a real branch here. At the moment I'm more of a passive member of the party and just pay, read the magazine and sometimes go to demonstrations the SP participates in, like on September 20th to a protest against the government's rigid savings, but I'm not really active and at the moment don't plan to either.
