My dad was a racist, misogynistic, and homophobic asshole with a bad temper when I was growing up. He wasn’t a very good figure.

My early days gifted me a kind, old black man (I’m white) who taught me a lot about just being a good man. I was young, so I didn’t understand until much later, but I credit him with a lot of my kindness and patience.

Later in my teen years, after the aforementioned fella vanished, it was honestly George Carlin as weird as that sounds. His stand-up did a lot to help shape my views and break away from the bigoted programming my dad tried to force into me. He wasn’t perfect, but he did have a lot of pretty progressive views and ideas, especially for the times the material originally released.

After losing him, I just learned from people. Right wing and/or heavily religious rhetoric continued to push me left and eventually satanic.