This is a
public service plea.
Ladies and gentlemen,
look at our lives. There's a common road, a road that you're expected to walk, the job-money-bills-stuff-and-worry road. That
road before you is
paved with the
greed and
fear of hundreds of
generations of people. We all know that
all other paths are
difficult and
dangerous, and we all know
where this path leads. We all know that you either
walk the consumer walk or
languish in horrible poverty, pretty much. The only real way to get around that is to
walk the walk so well that you
get rich and can then
do what you please. But the 1% that are rich have not
made it easy for you to get there, and they have all but
guaranteed that you will
flat-out DIE if you don't at least
try.
I mean,
think about it. When in
history, besides in
modern times, has a
lack of money had the power to
kill you? Money used to be something
useful, something
extra; if you had
money, you could have
nicer clothes than you would have
made on your own. If you had money, you could have
glass windows in your home; maybe even
someone to help you
work. But,
money or not, you always had
food, because you went out and killed it. You always had
water, because you went out and
drank it. You might not have lived an
easy life without
money, but you could live well enough.
Not now. Now, here,
money is a fucking
necessity. You aren't even
permitted to just
live in the woods and
kill your own food; you couldn't live without money now even if you
tried. And
self-sustaining communes and things like that are usually
blown up by the FBI.
I am not
suggesting that you
burn your money. I am only asking you to
remember that it does burn.
Is our
sociey really
designed around us? Do you feel like you've found your place in it, the place
you're happy with? I'm
ecstatic if you have, but I have not. I am not a
material person, yet I am
bombarded by advertisements everywhere I go.
Billboards.
Radio.
TV. Even the
Internet, as much as that
upsets me. I am not a
routine person, yet I am
forced into routine by the
absolute survival necessity of
having a job. I
value learning, and
wondering, and
helping people. But my
learning and
thinking and
trying to help others is not good enough for this society; in fact, often it is only by virtue of
being an asshole that I can get the
money I need to survive.
Nice people often die poor. Self-serving
hypocritical jerks often
get rich.
My situation is not a
hopeless one. Many folks, with
serendipity on their sides, have
succeeded without
compromising the really important stuff. So I'm sure there's a way, but still I hate--and I mean
red hot flaming fuck-you raged-out passionate HATE--the fact that our
society is
deliberately set-up to steer people towards
petty,
diminishing,
soulless living as a means of survival.
That is my
point of view, the cause of my
neuroses and my
nightmares. That is the
war that I'm
fighting, all the fucking time. Not that I don't get
tired of it. But here's the
important part. I've been finding out that I'm not the
only one who wants to make
good equal
beautiful equal
true in this
society. I suppose that may seem like a
minor revelation at best, but you gotta understand, until
yesterday, every time I even brought this up I was
hardcore written off.
Fast. I was shut out of people's
consideration by every excuse from
insanity to
PMS to
rudeness. People who are
struggling to succeed by the standards they were
given do NOT like other people
proposing that those standards are
fucking evil in many ways. But yesterday, I got told for the first time in the
eleven years I've been fighting this that
someone else feels the way I do. And perhaps
even more people than that.
So
fuck it; I'm using this
opportunity to
appeal to a generation--this one. The
up and coming; those of us who are
just beginning to run our
own lives. DON'T
SELL OUT LIKE THE HIPPIES DID. The hippies sold out, becoming
their parents with
lightning speed, because they were
afraid of dying poor; afraid of being
sixty and still
living on scraps. They saw that
society would try to
crush them for their
refusal to worship the dollar, and they
buckled. But as long as we
allow this fear to
dissolve the power of a
new generation of leaders, we are perpetuating the
madness. YOU and I will be the next
congressmen. We have to be, because the ones sitting up there now are going to
die. You and I will be the next
President. The next
CEO. All the
authority figures that pissed us off all through our youth are GOING TO DIE. Please, PLEASE, don't let their atrocities
survive in you.
Don't
sell out. Don't let your
possessions own you. Be a fucking
bastard, a passionate
raging lunatic, when it comes to your
ideals. Never let them
tell you that you have to
conform; never let them
hand you their
empire and
demand that you change nothing. Our children are coming, or
already here, and they are the most
valuable thing this fucked-up planet has going for it. The
ideals you perpetuate will be the
ideals that your
children live by. Don't
do to them what was
done to us.
Money is paper. Your
soul is
all you have, and after that, the
rest is silence.
Self-improvement is
masturbation. Try
having sex instead.