-^-for posterity-^-

my time on this earth is short, so i need to finish this before i’m finished. i have been given everything in life. i have enough money. i have enough food. i have friends and do not have any disgusting physical features. things were looking up when i was born. i was born in a country that was experiencing a wonderful string of prosperity. nothing could possibly have gone wrong. that was the naïve assumption. things did go wrong and they did so on so many different levels.

i started my life as any one of the thousands that share my generation. we were born in mid-sized houses on roads that you could play on. life was peaceful and worries were trite. when i was a child, my biggest concern was whether or not the fat kid from up the road would invite me and my brother to play nintendo in his basement. he normally didn’t and i still resent him for it. my parents had larger worries, but they were all trivial when one looked at the big picture. food was always available, so much so that we all had to watch what we ate. entertainment was mesmerizing. i could sit in front of the television for hours and watch nothing at all. i could sit there and just loft off into another realm. we had two cars and they were respectable. one was a chevy cavalier. it was blue.

as i grew up, i came to confront the same issues and problems that so many people of my generation confronted. we watched the cool kids start to date and were envious. we wore the same clothes as the cool kids in a vain attempt to be as cool as they were. we studied in school because we had to; bad grades meant that things would not be smooth at home and who wanted to miss bob sagot and t.g.i.f. on friday night. we made fun of other kids to make ourselves feel better. it was wonderful and we would giggle and smirk for hours quietly in the corner about someone’s latest classroom blunder.

then we hit puberty. girls became something mysterious and wonderful and they were the tribal status symbol. for me, puberty was terrible. i was, what is kindly referred to, as a ‘late bloomer’. in laymen’s terms, that’s a nice way to say ‘a boy who was made fun of because he was too short, didn’t have hair on his legs and his voice was distinctly higher than anyone else in the clan.’ we all learned how to survive those years. we all learned how to avoid the high school bully and how to get out of study hall. at that moment, i didn’t think life could get any worse.

college came and overnight we became adults. we were now in the same class as all the older brothers and sisters of friends who came home with long hair and dirty clothes. we were something wonderful to behold, like a picture of some celestial body exploding. here we were taught ideas that would shake us for our entire lives. we were taught things that didn’t have answers, questions that were more like cruel jokes staring up at us from humanities text books. questions that no one ever had an answer for and that no one ever would be able to clearly understand. we sat for hours and talked about god and government and love and what not. none of it was fruitful, except it made us feel good. in college we were all intellectual stars and bantered back and forth and rated the worth of everything. some subjects were not discussable. some things were rated as being too intellectual for any of us to bother touching, as if we would have to devote our entire lives to the study of one subject and inevitably grow irrevocably un-cool. as in high school, making fun of others was allowed. this time we understood and could identify that it was a way to hide underlying insecurities and, even after outlining that fact, we still partook in the activity because it did make us feel so much better about ourselves and had very few side-effects.

we were also told to care about things. we were told stories about poor countries and poor people and even poorer souls searching for simple things we took for granted. our hearts were filled with compassion for this or that injustice. we were going to go out and change all that. we were going to make the world different and it wouldn’t be a matter of time before all of our screams would be heard. it, however, became evident that our screams would only be heard as the final death rattle of youth. they would not be taken seriously, only as a precursor to growing up. the scream was our communal entry into young-adulthood.

we were made to question everything. we were given simple things and told to weigh their value, their authority. we were asked to question the teacher, the system, the school. without questions, nothing would ever be accomplished. this lead to a total abandonment of truth, for nothing could be firmly rooted if it was barraged with questions because everything, inevitably, had a flaw. we grew sarcastic, and wonderfully so.

we were told to love our country, our system, with all our hearts. the television told us that. the television and old people. we were told that it was pure, unique and proudly benevolent. however, we were told this after we were told to question everything and no one could seriously accept this as fact in any way. all you had to do was look briefly at history to develop a keen taste for hypocrisy.

so, as with all of those in my generation, i came through college believing nothing and everything at the same time. i was, like socrates before me, sure that no one was wise, as i was not wise. however, that in itself was wisdom, to some extent. i was sophomoric but i knew so. i knew the world was not clear and that i could never define or change it. where did i go from here? where does my generation go from here? after being blessed with all, we have no clear direction. after being blessed with all, we still have problems that must be resolved. after being blessed with all, we still have the nagging questions that have no answer.

i type, not to be heard, to be relieved.