What was your first cause?

Fairness, which is probably every kid’s first cause, if you think about it. Of course, our notion of “fair” changes as we mature. I’d call it “equal rights” or “social justice” now, but it’s still my number one cause.

Seventh grade I also marched in a protest against the Vietnam War. I really was too young to understand what I was doing, but a lot of the kids from school were doing it, so I did too.

Mine was the whale hunting. I joined Greenpeace when I was in my 20’s.

Wow! Pretty funny. I first read this question as in what was my personal first cause. What caused me? Not what cause did I support.

There were several causes going on when I was growing up, and I can’t say which was first. I was against the war. I was for civil rights. I was for women’s rights. Of them all, I think women’s rights made the most sense to me in terms of my own life. I know I attended some protest marches, but I can’t remember what the first one was. Maybe it was for the ERA.

As a child, I formed a club of neighborhood children and we clipped comics from newspapers and made scrapbooks to take to the local retirement home.

I walked (I didn’t want to call it marching because that reminded of the military) against the Vietnam War when I was a student at UC Berkeley.

That was in the fall of 1965, when I was a member of the pseudo-Trotskyite Young Socialist’s Alliance.

I was in a couple of protests against the launching of the second Iraq War when I was in high school.

@wundayatta, I read the question in the same way as well. I thought this was going to be a metaphysical kind of thread :-p

Perhaps someone should ask this again, only with the metaphysical meaning.

Like @augustlan said, fairness. Being a genderqueer child, gender equality was the first thing I realized wasn’t equitable, followed shortly thereafter by racial equality when my teacher mom hired a black lady to take care of me and do the cooking and cleaning while she was away teaching high school science classes. I recognized what an outstanding woman Caroline the maid was, and what a shitty deal she was getting despite all her and her husband’s hard work and honest lifestyle. I was just starting school at the time, but I could already see that the world wasn’t fair.

I remember watching films about apartheid in South Africa at school and being horrified. It was my first ‘formal’ introduction to racial discrimination.

I grew up in the 60’s, which involved a lot of yelling and protesting.
My first cause was to get people to quietly discuss, not close their ears to others while they yell what should be done.
I look around today, and see my cause never had a chance.

I grew up in the 50s with parents who believed deeply in civil rights for all, and I count myself fortunate to have marched on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the following decade.

We had a walk out against the war when I was a freshman in high school (Spring of 1969).

Civil rights. Learning of the mistreatment of blacks in the South complete with photographs of lynchings, I was infuriated. I was too young to go do something about it, but I resolved to not let prejudice make me be unkind to any one.

Environmentalism/conservationism. Must have been all that Captain Planet.

This will probably seem stupid to most people on here, but my first and still ongoing cause is sticking up for the extremely little “guys,” the invertebrates such as insects, arachnids, etc..

When someone notices one and decides to prove their “dominance” by killing it for no other reason than the fact they can, I do my best to capture and relocate it.

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal : Glad to hear that. I hate it when people kill insects because they can. Growing up in the tropics, I’ve rescued and relocated a powerful lot of bugs (and geckos, frogs, toads, etc.)

@bookish1 Wow that’s awesome. I’m really glad to hear I’m not the only one. I once had to rescue a baby snake. The person who had it accidentally dropped it and they were scared to touch it with their bare hands so they were using a glass to try and catch it. They weren’t trying to scare the snake into the glass they were trying to put the rim of the glass over the snakes head so they could grab its body so as to avoid being bitten. The problem with that was that a) the snake was moving, b) the snake was barely bigger than a night-crawler in length and diameter. With it being that small it could have easily been injured or killed just from the weight of the glass alone.

It upset me so much that I just reached down and grabbed the snake and handed it the person.

In hindsight I probably should’ve just released the snake rather than give it back to someone who was so obviously under-qualified to care for it.

@Self_Consuming_Cannibal : Aww, baby snake rescue! The only time I’ve ever killed a snake was a water moccasin, to protect my cats (who stupidly thought it was a toy).
Yeah, my family kept ‘bug jars’ all around the house. We were always rescuing spiders and lizards. And I had a bug jar in my bathroom, because geckos always seemed to want to hang out in there. I had to rescue them before my cats would eat them!

@bookish1 Ah yes. The joys of rescuing things from cats. Cats are one of the few creatures who seem to actually “torture” and play with their food. But that’s just cats being cats.

And to be clear, yes I have and still do kill to protect myself or my loved ones, but only as a last resort.

I remember rescuing a pigeon and taking it home to my dad. I found it by the side of the road on my way home from school and wrapped it up in my little coat (I was five). Trouble was it was already dead! He was very good about it. Explained it was passed saving and promised to take it with him to work and give it a proper burial in a special place. I suspect that was actually the dustbin. So perhaps caring for animals was actually my first cause too.

In kindergarten I started standing up for the kids who were being picked on.

I would take them under my wing for a week or however long their unpopularity lasted, encourage them listen to them etc even if I disagreed with them or personally disliked them.

When they were recycled we would mutually forget about each other until they pissed the wrong people off again.

I never could understand the complexity of the small town small school social ladder.

There were a few people that I was friends with regardless of their social standing. But I really enjoyed pissing off the in crowd by being a safe harbor.

And it did piss them off. But why they cared I don’t really know.

Thankfully, I have since moved on to more logical and worthy pursuits.