I started college again in January of 2009. Another local college had taken over the Lawrenceville campus of Georgia Perimeter. I therefore had to go to a different  GPC campus, which was actually even closer to home.  That semester I took Environmental Science, Psychology, US History II, (it was not necessary to take the history classes in the right order) as well as literature and film class.

The Environmental Science course was extremely difficult, taught by a strict, yet fair professor. There we had to take several written tests and a group project. In Psychology, the class was fun, despite involving a group project as well. But the best class without a doubt was the US history course, which also involved the history of baseball. While I am not a fan of the sport by any means, I can appreciate the fact that sports can and do influence a nation’s culture and history. Many historians and other social scientists have a kind of cultural elitism about them that prevents them from seeing this correlation. The literature and film course included a weekly reading of a short story and the viewing of the film version of a different short story by the same author. It was an excellent way of learning.

The summer that followed was largely uneventful. The only important occurrence I remember from it was that my new caseworker at the Department of Labor was quite rude to me and put pressure on me to graduate. While his predecessor understood my struggle with depression and told me to ease into classes when I was ready, the new one lacked any kind of empathy. He asked me whether I knew how much money I was costing the state. He was quite harsh--what I did not know, however, was that his successor a few years later would make him look good in comparison.

In the fall, I had a bizarre online Physical Education class, World History II, Communication, as well as an astronomy class with a lab astronomy lab. I do not remember having to do much for PE, though I did pass the class.  The same professor who taught the US history and baseball class a semester before taught world history as well. He was a particular expert on French Revolution. It was an enjoyable course. I had to overcome my shyness for the Communication class, but I did surprisingly well with it, with formal speeches about an Irish politician, and the history of the World Cup, as well as a speech about corporate influence on the American political system. While the astronomy classes were certainly more tolerable than any mainstream science courses would have been, it suffices to say that I survived them.

Early in 2010, the US Supreme Court made one of its worst rulings in modern times with the decision of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. It ruled that corporations and unions had a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. This Orwellian interpretation of the freedom of speech opened the floodgates for private money’s control of elections and public policy. It has enabled the billionaire Koch brothers and other right-wing tycoons to slowly but surely recreate the nation in their own image. That decision, along with the emergence of the Tea Party movement, paved the way for Republican control of at first the House of Representatives and four years later, the Senate as well

Also in January 2010, I started my last semester at GPC. I took Sociology, Choices for Life, as well as US History I.  Sociology was a great course, in which both the professor and the other students seemed to think quite highly of me. We did a culture project, in which I explained the importance of soccer in Germany and the cultural icon that Bayern Munich is in Bavaria. The Choices for Life course was taught by a young professor who was quite open about her personal experiences in college, which made lectures quite interesting. My therapist helped me through the physical assignments of the class. I did the most important one on my own, though. It was walking with my walker around the house and keeping a journal about it. American History I was quite easy for me. It was only a slight variation of what I had been learning about early American history since the time I came here in eighth grade. It was my only semester ever, which I finished with straight A’s.

My paternal grandfather suddenly died during that semester. It was an early winter morning when my grandparents woke up. He told my grandmother that he would continue sleeping for a little while longer. He died during that sleep and it was not until later that morning, when a guest came to visit him, that my grandmother discovered he was dead. Again, it was an early-morning call from Bosnia that woke us up in the middle of the night to tell us the news, just as it had with my maternal grandfather’s death, a few years earlier. This time, it was on a weekday morning of a day on which I had multiple tests. I was of course shaken once again, but my father’s reaction helped tremendously. He told us that while it was a very sad day, we still had to go on and focus on the work ahead. Somehow the funeral took place the next day and as had been the case with my mother, my father had to miss his father’s burial service too.

The year before I graduated from GPC, it became clear to me that I needed to continue my education and go on to earn my bachelor’s degree, regardless of what the people at the Department of Labor would say. The meeting in which I told my case worker about that decision was surprisingly pleasant. He told me to not only go the safe route in applying only to the new, local four-year college, but to try to make it into a major university, in which case he said that his agency was prepared to pay for tuition.  I applied to Georgia State University, Kennesaw State University, and to Georgia Gwinnett College. I was soon accepted by all three, but for practical reasons, I decided to enroll locally.

Georgia Gwinnett College is an ambitious new school that offered me the educational challenges and opportunities I was looking for, while still making it possible for me to continue living at home. I was wisely cautious about enrolling in too many courses my first semester at GGC. I chose an introductory film course, along with American economic history as well as the history of the Middle East and India. I found the general level of classes far more challenging than I had been used to. I had been accustomed to being the dominant student in my history classes. That changed dramatically at GGC. Those higher-level courses generally included only history majors, some of them were more passionate about the subject matter than I was…and some were also frankly more intelligent than I was.  That meant I needed to work significantly harder than before.

The film course was still quite rudimentary. We had three fifty-minute lectures about basic theory each week. Furthermore we met to watch a weekly movie, which we were then asked to write short essays about. As our final project, we analyzed a film of our choice. For me, it was The Miracle of Berne, the historical fiction about West Germany’s 1954 World Cup triumph and about how it affected ordinary people.

 American economic history required reading many long articles, though most of them dealt with interesting subjects. It also required a group project that was a book review as well as the longest term paper I had written to that point. The group project was about income gap based on gender, and the paper was a boring and badly written analysis of the comparative history of paved roads in our county compared to the national level.

The Middle East and India class involved much information that we never covered in earlier classes. That made it all the more interesting and challenging as well. It included a book review about the Ottoman Empire, a presentation about Indian independence, and a research paper about Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.

As mentioned above in passing, I had joined the Green Party a few years earlier and by this time, I was attending the annual meetings of the state party in Georgia. There were also monthly phone conferences that I was a part of. But somehow I never really spoke at any of these meetings. I was by far the youngest person there and felt quite intimidated by that for years. I also disagreed with the focus that the party on identity politics. While trying to achieve racial and gender equality is a noble goal, the tactics of race-based nationalism and hyper-feminism were completely backwards.  The older I became, the more did I realize this. In that process, I was drawn more and more to Trotskyism and its appeal to all students and workers around the world. By addressing billions of people without distinction, it is able to look at much more profound forms of oppression. Nonetheless it took me a few more years to fully understand this.

In January 2011, I   took the following classes: the History of Politics and Culture, the History of China and Japan, as well as ITECH, a basic computer course. The first of those classes was mostly about philosophy rather than politics. It went into detail about Greek philosophy in particular, with which my girlfriend helped me greatly. The other history course started with the history of China and went into that of Japan later in the semester. We were asked to write essays, comparing and contrasting the two countries at the end. The computer class dealt mostly with Microsoft Office software and some web design.

The summer that followed was quite special. My mother and I were finally able to arrange a week-long vacation in Greece, where we would meet my girlfriend and her family. Toward the end of June, we took a direct flight from Atlanta to Athens. A day or so before the trip, the people at hotel we had originally booked told us that they no longer were able to host us. My girlfriend was quickly able to find another place for us, thankfully. Shortly after we arrived in Athens, she and her mother met us at the airport. It was a deeply emotional scene. To see her in person for the first time was an incredible feeling, and our first embrace, moments later, felt so natural. We quickly saw what we had known all along: we were true soul mates and not at all strangers. My mother and I had our separate room, while my girlfriend had one of her own. She and I spent most of the days together in the latter. She had brought her laptop with her and we watched countless documentaries with topics ranging from politics and history to religion on it. The days went by very quickly like that.

Early in the week, her mother took us to see some ancient ruins and to eat lunch at a restaurant. Toward the end of the week, we went to dinner with both of her parents.  They are both amazing people whom I consider two of my closest friends. I had exchanged several e-mails with both of them in the past, but seeing them in person was of course a much more amazing experience. They are the prototypical intellectuals who live in big cities in Europe and around the world. But it was their warmth, kindness, and hospitality that impressed me the most. It was in every respect as though I were meeting people whom I had known my whole life. Despite all the sadness of having to leave after the week had flown by, I was happy for the experiences I had on that trip. I was especially thrilled that my relationship was better than I could have dreamed.

In the fall, I took courses in the history of World War II, the History of Ancient Greece and the Mediterranean, as well as a history course in ancient and medieval science and technology. The two ancient history courses overlapped in terms of content to a degree. In the former, I held a presentation about the Oracle at Delphi, for which my girlfriend greatly helped me prepare. In the science and technology course, I wrote an extended review of a book about the developments in weaponry and warfare from the Sumerian epoch to that of the Roman Empire. Naturally, the World War II course was also largely a military history class. To make up for that, I wrote the term paper about Nazi ideology. That was hardly more pleasant, because it made Hitler’s nonsensical and incoherent rambling in Mein Kampf must-read” literature.” It caused me to ponder how a country with such a history of scientific and literary achievement like Germany could ever have taken an ignorant madman such as Hitler seriously. Now I have some answers: firstly, economic hardship in general always gives rise to extremist parties of all stripes and secondly, when great nations are humiliated in the way that Germany was with the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, they turn to nationalism and fascism for answers. But make no mistake, this is not meant to excuse the horrific crimes of the Nazi regime. It is merely an attempt to explain how its party gained popularity in Germany!

The fall of 2011was also a significant turning point in American political consciousness. It marked the start of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in my opinion has been the only major social movement in this country since the 1960s.While it is easy to point to flaws about OWS, it is also undeniable that the movement achieved giving class-consciousness to Americans, which is a vital concept that that they had lacked for at least a generation. It also effectively scared the elites and finally brought to their attention the pressing issue of income inequality. While it is quite comical to watch Democratic and Republican politicians alike try to talk about this issue, the fact that they are talking about it is a significant step forward.

I realized that I had to take more classes in order to graduate at a time that was acceptable to those providing me with transportation. That is why I took four classes starting in January of 2012. They were public history, a course called the History of Europe and the Islamicate World; Medieval Life, Religion, and Thought; as well as a Latin American film class. Public history focused on non-teaching professions in the field of history. We needed to do several interesting projects for it, one of which took me to the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, while another was an interview of my father about life in Tito’s Yugoslavia. The second class was about the cultural clash of civilizations between European peoples and Muslims, from the start of the spread of Islam forward. The class was largely focused on the term paper we wrote for it and mine largely stressed the positive and humane aspects of this interaction. The third course dealt with all things medieval and the only thing I can remember about it is that we watched several YouTube videos about the most difficult jobs in medieval times. The film course was perhaps the most fascinating one. It looked not only into movies from Latin America, but also into the region’s history, culture, and politics. I was able to contribute much to the class, due to my knowledge of especially the political aspects of it.

I took my only summer class the following June and July. It was a very interesting course about the history of modern Europe, starting with the French Revolution and the development of several political ideologies. It included a role play, which was a post-World War I discussion between citizens of the European nations in that war about which country did or did not start the conflict. I represented Serbia. Toward the end of that course I suddenly became ill, with excruciating abdominal pain. I had my appendix removed and had to recover at home from the operation for a whole week. That significantly extended the semester for both myself and the professor. I am truly grateful to him, for his patience in letting me make up all the missing work. Since it was such a short semester, the professor gave us the topic and the sources for the term paper. It was digital archives of various diplomatic cables during the July Crisis that led to World War I, we simply had to analyze them and reconstruct the circumstances that led to the war.

The following fall semester was my last full semester of classes. I took the history of modern Germany, the history of modern Britain, a religion and social justice course, as well as US immigrant history. I enjoyed these classes that dealt with twentieth and twenty-first century issues a lot more than those that covered ancient history. My term papers were about the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany, the human side of the industrial revolution in Britain, voter suppression in the United States, and an interview of my mother about her experience of immigrating to America. The 2012 elections took place during that semester as well. Republican nominee Mitt Romney proved that he was the rich, arrogant right-wing ignoramus that I always suspected him of being, which led to the re-election of President Obama.

I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history in May of 2013, after having taken geography as well as the Senior Capstone that semester. The geography course was quite basic and dealt with “new school geography,” which included topics such as urban planning and different kinds of maps, while not addressing where places are on those maps, which is considered classical geography. As for the Senior Capstone, the cards were stacked against me from the start there. I did not know that this extended written work was ideally supposed to be an elaboration of an earlier term paper, and that we needed an  outside professor as content advisor ahead of time. Since I did not have those things, the Capstone professor agreed to help me as long as I wrote about an American topic, since US history was his specialization. I decided to write about Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate of the early twentieth century.

Think of socialism what you will, but the fact of the matter is that Debs was a special figure, who much like Martin Luther King and other progressives, believed in America’s promise for a better society. It was his party that demanded child labor laws, voting rights for women, and human dignity for workers, before any elite politician ever took up these issues. The purpose of writing about that particular subject was to show the necessity of a strong leftist opposition to these elites, without which no progress can be made for the working class and without which all the progress that has been made can and will be rolled back.

My life story is a story of defeating the odds. It is a story of hard work in order to make the seemingly impossible possible. It is meant to inspire people in dire circumstances, letting them know that with determination, a positive attitude, and the help of the people around them, they too can overcome the odds. It was unthinkable to the doctors in Zagreb, who diagnosed me with cerebral palsy that I would ever be able to write, much less walk, let alone graduate with a history degree from an American college. As a side note, I know that to many people my politics will not be pleasant and my passion for soccer will be boring, but without those two things, it would be impossible to tell my story, because without politics and soccer, I would not be myself.

Next Chapter: Dedications