Interesting Conversation

Today I had an interesting conversation with a student at lunch that further affirms my belief that schools and society serve as prisons, and that we live in an absurdly violent culture. Here it is:

Student: I found out yesterday that they are giving my dad 20 years. So I won't see him until I'm 30.

Me: Oh my goodness. I wish I knew what to say. That's awful. I'm so, so sorry.

Student: Yeah, I know. It makes me sad. But he might get 10. They aren't sure yet.


Me: Wow. That's still a lot.

Student: He might get time off for good behavior.


Me: Really?

Student: Yeah, like, if he doesn't do anything bad in prison. Kind of like recess.


Me: Recess?

Student: Yeah. Like how you have to owe time at recess and you serve your time before you can play.


Me: ...

Student: I miss him.


Me: I am sure. I miss my dad, too.

Student: Yeah.


Me: Tell me, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Student: A soldier.


Me: Why?

Student: Cuz it's cool.


Me: Really? How so? What's cool about it?

Student: You get camouflage, cool clothes, grenades...


Me: Grenades? What do soldiers use grenades for?

Student: For blowing people to smithereens! And you get smoke bombs to shoot up fox holes and stuff.


Me: How do you know all this stuff?

Student: I just do. I know a lot about guns. You get guns as a soldier.


Me: Oh? Tell me about that.

Student: Well, you get, like, machine guns, AK-47s, pistols, and shotguns. My favorites are a pistol and a shotgun.

Me: You have favorites? How do you know which is your favorite?

Student: I just do. I've held a pistol and a shotgun. I like them both.


Me: Oh, okay. Just wondering.

Student: Actually, my favorite is the machine gun. I love the sound it makes...tukka tukka tukka tukka!


Me: Yeah, it shoots a lot of bullets...

Student: And there's this one gun, I saw it in a videogame, it, like, charges up and then shoots a bullet that's smaller than a missile but super powerful.


Me: What videogames did you see this in?

Student: Call of Duty, Halo. There's lots of games about war.


Me: You're right about that.

Have-To Disease

We live in a culture of force. If the force is not immediately visible to us, it's always seething beneath the surface. You may live in a nice home or apartment, but miss three payments and someone's going to come knocking to force you out. You may have a job, but if you decide you want to take extra time off for your own good, soon enough you'll be experiencing some threat of force: do your work or lose your job. You may have heat, water, and electricity, but stop paying those things because you feel it's not right to have to pay to live, and you'll be cut off and your information will be sent to bill collectors who will try to get that money by force.

When I think about what the overarching pattern of our society is, I can't help but think we suffer from the having-to disease. It's everywhere and we're all infected.

Why do we work? We have to. Why? Because if we don't we won't have money. Why do we need money? We have to. Why? Because without money we can't buy our way into society. Why do we have cars? We have to. Why? Because we live in a society that's not designed for walking. Why do we need to spend huge amounts of money on gasoline? We have to. Why? Because our entire world depends on the perpetual use of dead dinosaurs and millions-years dead plants.Why do we pay taxes? We have to. Why? Because if we don't we'll go to jail. Why do I have to teach this? I have to. Why? Because the government tells me to, and if I don't and the kids fail a test, I could lose my job. But, why do we work? Now we're back at the beginning again.

Over a long enough period of time, realizing how much of life we're forced into without our consent can become overbearing. We have one solution: to continue living in unbearable conditions, we must lie to ourselves. To keep up the way we do, we have to daily, hourly, constantly tell ourselves lies. We tell ourselves that all the have-tos are want-tos. I addressed this in a previous post. If they're really want-tos, why do we keep doing them? Because the force, the threat, the violence is invisible and seething just beneath the surface.

The brilliance of our culture is that it completely segregates us from the realities of our existence. I've been taken aback the past couple of days by how perfect everything appears. Look around you. Everything is so shiny, so clean-looking, so nice and warm. Docile. We don't see the realities of things because the lies must keep coming for the system to carry on. We don't see the seven year-old girl getting whipped with a cane for sewing the Gap logo on too slowly. We don't see the calluses on the hands of migrants in the strawberry fields of California. We don't see the Middle Eastern wailings over the bodies of the children killed by predator drones, all so we can get around town.

And what about us? Our pay is segregated from the reality of our existence. Since most of us don't get paid daily, there is the illusion that our work is somehow disconnected from our money. When you break down what we spend our money on, and realize that we literally had to work for what we have, it all gets very confusing. Wait, so a portion of my work goes to paying for gasoline in my car so I can continue to work? And I have to pay for insurance, license plates, oil changes, and maintenance with my work - with hours of my life? And a portion of my work goes to the government in the form of taxes? When I break it down, I am literally working for the government for three days a months for free. Working for free...isn't that...slavery? 

I realized two days ago that I am in debt. I used to tell others that I graduated from college without debt. I felt so proud that I had made it through the insane system unscathed. Then when I started teaching I was miserable. Hate(d) it. After a while, I began asking myself, why should I keep doing something that makes me miserable? The answer became clear. I have to. Why? Because if I don't, I will owe back $54,000. Invisible, beneath the surface, seething. The threat of force and violence. I'm in debt, only the thing is, I'm paying back that debt not with money but with years of my life - four, to be exact. Paying for something with years of your life...isn't that...slavery?

All these have-tos. They are all around us, whether we want to admit it or not. The sooner we admit to them being have-tos, the sooner we can stop lying to ourselves and begin asking ourselves what our real want-tos are. What do we want to do? What do you want to do? What do I want to do?

steel, stucco, aluminum, plastic, particle board, glass

I drive through this scene every day on my way to school:

It's the West Bottoms area of Kansas City. It's this agglomeration of railroads, old buildings (used for haunted houses in the fall), and stretches of highway. Every morning I drive through this area, and lately I've been thinking about all the other places in the world that aren't here.

I've written about this before: how strange and sad it is that while we are busy bustling around areas like the one pictured above, there are millions of acres of beauty sitting silent because we're all crammed into the cities.

This summer, my wife and I are going to Greece. Here is one of the places we are thinking of visiting:

I read a book last summer called The River Why. A line from the book has stuck with me and gnawed at me in the way life-changing literature does. I don't have the book in front of me so I can't quote it directly, but I've turned it over and over in my mind for so long that I think I can get it pretty close. 

All those people living crammed in cities like the cities are God's gift to earth, when they could be living on acres and acres of land in the wilderness.

Think about it. We live in an artificial landscape of our own design, and, frankly, a lot of it is poisonous. We live in a mass of steel, stucco, aluminum, plastic, particle board, glass, and metal. We live in a designed reality that requires we give our lives to it to keep it from collapsing. The Sears Tower would collapse in five years without human upkeep. We convince ourselves we're free, when we're really working to keep up a lifestyle that can only be supported by work. It reminds me of the character Desmond in Lost, who must push a button every 108 minutes or, he's told, a terrible thing will happen. He can never venture out too far because he's got to push that button every 108 minutes. One day he doesn't make it in time, and, yeah something bad happens, but it wasn't the end of the world. He's still alive, and the system he was a slave to is destroyed. 

It was Oscar Wilde who said, "I don't want to earn a living; I want to live." Why don't we do that? 

The stark contrast between the two pictures is jarring. We tell ourselves, no, I can't have that, that's only for rich people, I've got too much going on here to leave, I will when I retire, I would go but I've got to save up for a new car, I'll go next month, next summer, next year, next time. We use that excuse next time like we've got an infinite amount of them. If we use next time enough, the only one we'll have left is dying. And like Louis C.K. said, you're going to be dead for way longer than you're going to be alive. 

January Tomatoes

In September, discombobulated with the madness of teaching and burdened by the constraints of a long-term contract, I told my wife, "I'm in prison." I felt the imprisonment in each and every moment. I had begun to acutely sense that, were this feeling to continue long term, my youth would slip through my fingers quickly. I felt it slipping through my fingers each day; over and over again I poured the water into the coffee maker each morning after dragging myself out of bed; over and over again I walked with slumped shoulders to my car and drove; over and over again I cherished the hotness of the fresh coffee because hot coffee meant I was further from the start of the school day; over and over again I floated through the madness of each day - the insane demands of administration, the oppression of poverty, the inanity of the system - in a whirlwind of emotion; over and over I questioned myself and whether or not I would wake up one day and be sixty and wonder where my life went.

A lot has changed, and not much has changed. This is a blog about both.

The not much has changed part will be a little easier to explain. There was a time in my life where I was wont to shrug off any questions, as I was informed to do by the many environmental influences surrounding me (more on that in a moment). These days I'm much less hesitant to question things, and I think I'm at the point where I run to the questions first and enjoy finding new things to question. They've proven far more liberating to me than anything else I've encountered; they relieve the pressure of our pain by giving it a voice and allowing us to honestly take a look at our lives. Often, we shy away from the most uncomfortable questions because we're afraid of the responsibility and truth the answers may hold. Over the years, I've found myself time and time again in environments which actively discourage the kind of critical thinking that gives birth to freedom. I know many of the readers of this blog are religious, so I want to preface what I'm about to say with a caveat: If you are easily offended, the rest of this blog may not be something you will want to read. I'm going to be very honest about some things I've been feeling for a long time, and I'm probably going to say a few things that some will find offensive. I'm being honest when I say I warned you.

I've always been a doubter. My mom tells this great anecdote about when she told me the truth about Santa Claus. I was five, and when she told me she saw my face turn dark, and suddenly the questions came pouring out in rapid succession. Is the Easter Bunny real, I asked. No, my mom said. Is the Tooth Fairy real? No, she said. I paused, my five year-old gears cranking furiously. Is Jesus real? My mom caught her breath. Yes, she said. I looked at her and said, Why should I believe you?

I never liked raising my hands in church. Something about it just didn't sit right with me. It felt like such an...awkward thing to do. It didn't make sense to me, yet I forced myself to do it, from a very young age. I also didn't like singing in church - the eyes closed, uncomfortably rocking on my heels, cheeks burning from embarrassment - but I (you guessed it) forced myself to do it from a very young age. I wanted to fit in, and I somehow felt like I was taking a stand for something (God?) when I sang. Which, when you think about taking a stand, you don't really envision doing so in places (like church) where everyone is gathered for the same reason. But I suppressed my doubts.

My next experience with church doubt was when I was in elementary school and was told by youth pastors that I would go to hell if I didn't speak in tongues. After hearing that, lo and behold, I developed the gift of tongues. I'm pretty sure all I was really doing was saying Kamehameha from Dragon Ball Z. But I wanted to belong (and, uh, not burn in hell forever), so I suppressed my doubts and tried to make sense of it. There's the time I was in high school, and I preached a sermon about the importance of irreverence, and was very promptly shut down by my peers. There's also the time that I made the Bible study teachers uncomfortable when I asked about the timeline for Adam, Eve, and the dinosaurs. But I wanted to belong, so I suppressed the doubts further. When everyone was telling me that I was wrong, I internalized that there must be something deeply wrong with me, and I condemned the doubts I had as some sort of disbelief in the obvious.

Fast forward to being in my early twenties, working for a church. The childhood doubts were deep beneath the surface, beneath all the (still!) rocking back and forth on my heels while humming to an esoteric song about majesty. I suppressed the doubts even further, because I was, after all, a preacher, and preachers are the ones who suppress their doubts most of all. I was quiet even when I was advised by bosses to make a sermon about my father's suicide more lighthearted because it was "a little heavy." Sure, fair enough, maybe there's some sense to be made in all of it. Even when my wife was shut down for questioning the Bible in a group meeting, we both suppressed our doubts and tried to make sense of it (she questioned the story of Noah - how could that have been the first rainbow if rainbows are light reflecting off water droplets? Was there no water on the earth before then?).

I eventually left the church, mostly by petering out. No one really contacted us, except for one couple. I breathed a sigh of relief. Time to think, finally. I began teaching soon after. That's when the suppression, all the doubts, began to bubble like magma beneath the surface of my certainty that there was some sense to be made of this society, this culture, this civilization. When I finally began to ask honest questions, I found an emerging pattern.

Before I began teaching, I took a month-long road trip with my wife across the west coast. It was ultimate freedom, for the first time in my life. I lived. Then I came back and began working in a school, and experienced the opposite. Control, manipulation, deceit. I began to ask dangerous questions, such as, Why do we need to work to support a lifestyle that can only be supported by work? Why do we need to essentially sell the hours of our lives in exchange for crummy pay? Why are we locked into a wage society that depends on constant income? Why do we need to have to pay just to live? I began to realize that, in a lot of ways, we are civilized prostitutes, giving our various services to people who are willing to pay us in exchange for, oh, not much, just the precious hours of our lives. Suddenly, I stopped buying into the predetermined boundaries of the debate and started questioning the basis of the debate itself. I began going right to the heart of it, questioning the basis of the power games we all engage in.

I began thinking about church, and the things that bothered me so much growing up. I began to think about how, the most powerful thing the powerful can do is to reinforce their own power. This seems obvious, but it manifests itself in different ways. Oftentimes, this is done by convincing the oppressed that, without the powerful, the oppressed would suffer greatly. As I think about most Christian theology, it can be boiled down to: Let me save you from what I will do to you if you don't worship me. That's a mighty powerful way to reinforce a power structure. Also, there are many verses in the Bible about being a happy slave. Accept your slavery as an inevitable condition of life on this terrible earth, and simply smile through it because you've got God on your side. When the master leaves and entrusts you with property, you better work to increase the master's riches. Think about how these verses reinforce an incredibly destructive power structure, and how they ultimately benefit the slave-master. Don't question the framework of your reality; accept it and move on. All the theology about predestination that keeps us complacent with the way things are, keeps us docile. The worship songs, too. All the verses about majesty, power, longing for another life because this one's so hard but that's just the way it is. I can remember a youth pastor telling me that spending 1,000 years scrubbing God's toilet would be better than another moment on this earth. I didn't like that image. Another youth pastor told me none of us would remember each other in Heaven because we'd be so focused on God. I didn't like that image either (why would I want to go to amnesiac heaven?). But, I was told again and again, God's in control, so don't worry about it. These days I'm wondering if heaven and hell aren't anything more than carrots and sticks aimed at placating our most deep-seated fears, doubts, and hopes. Just keep waiting on Jesus and keep your eyes to the ground.

In reading that last paragraph, I noticed a word came up more than once: slave. When I'm in my braver moments, I'm able to acknowledge that we are all essentially slaves. You might say, no, of course I'm not a slave! I have a nice car, a place to sleep, grocery stores and coffee shops and a job. I'm pretty sure you have payments on that car, insurance payments, gas to buy at the gas station (which, might as well get a slushy while you're there, right?), rent to pay, utilities as well. We convince ourselves these are our responsibilities and duties as free adults. As far as the grocery stores go, they certainly have a monopoly on that. None of us grows our own food because we a.) don't have access to land, b.) don't know how, and c.) depend on the grocery stores to provide for us. And the food we do eat is outsourced from around the world. And the coffee - would we really have a coffee culture if we didn't have a work-centric culture? We need legal stimulants in our lives in order to function efficiently. We tell ourselves, I can back out at any time, I can leave it all and be free, truly free, to spend time doing things I love and not worrying about time and money. But we never do, do we? Interesting. And it's not just us. We each have anywhere from 80 to 300 ghost slaves working for us at any time. Our clothes, our computers, our food, and our oil all come from somewhere, and people all around the world are doing the work to create it for us.

It's because, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we've been effectively stripped of our options. We live in a destructive civilization, a force which aims to control and oppress. Religion is only a small part of this, as is coffee. As is school. I was reading portions of a CIA torture manual recently, and I was disturbed to find many striking parallels between the manual and teaching. Things like: Let them hate us so long as they fear us; overwhelm the subject with incessant babble for a long enough period of time and they will eventually cave in to your demands (politics, too?); it is important to maintain the power of the threat - create an environment where they will be inflicting the damage on themselves only because they are more afraid of what you will do to them. 

That last one was referencing the tactic of forcing prisoners to stand for extended, painful periods of time. The only reason they keep inflicting the pain on themselves is because they fear what would happen to them by the hands of the torturer if they stopped doing what they were told. Substitute standing for sitting in that last sentence and you've got teaching. These days I feel like schools are places of preparation for lives as a wage slave. The practice of teaching is called pedagogy. The word is rooted in the Roman pedagogues, the slaves of the empire who were required to teach others the ways of the empire. When they're stripped of all the propaganda, schools are places where children are indoctrinated with the values of the American empire. Curriculum is the required material to cover which will achieve this goal. Spend thirteen years (if you don't get retained) in this system and you're lucky if your creativity survives, because it's a system hell-bent on oppressing all individuality, creativity, beauty, and genius. And we're all bored to death.

A practice of institutions which keeps power structures in place is to blame the abused. Abusers often blame the abused for their actions. I believe we live in an abusive society (pizza's a vegetable now and corporations are people, didn't you hear?) that harms our world and our humanity. We are encouraged by the powerful to focus only on ourselves - where are we impure, where is the plank in our eye, where is the hypocrisy, where is the violence in our hearts, what can we give and do to make a difference, etc. By keeping it abstract and self-centered, the powerful and the power structure continue to move full-steam ahead. The truth is that we are, like children in violent situations beyond their control, stripped of our options, so to focus solely on ourselves is ultimately to learn to hate ourselves and loathe our lives. It's a convenient plot for the powerful, because it keeps us in a perpetual state of self-doubt and denial.

I think I've given up on trying to make sense of our society. There's no sense to be made of it. There's no sense to be made of all the misery I see all around me - the oppressive poverty; the cultural and land-based colonialism; the dependence on destruction in order to keep living (read: oil); the 3,000+ ads we see each day telling us we're ugly and fat; the working our lives away. A while back a writer described the dissatisfaction of Occupy Wall Street as being total. It's not one thing, it's everything, and the protesters are giving a middle finger to our entire society, shouting fuck this shit. Why can't that be okay to say?

I don't know. There's a proverb - Don't bother talking sense to fools, they'll only end up poking fun at your words. This entire society is foolishness - church, school, wage slavery, government - and trying to make sense of it is in a way settling to the terms of a debate I fundamentally oppose. Trying to make sense of it - and by sense I also mean focusing your energy on trying to transform something destructive into something healthy - will steal your soul and poke fun at you in the meantime. There is simply no sense to be made of it. We live in a civilization which is based on slavery (we even got millions-years-dead dinosaurs and millions-years-dead plants to work for us by using fossil fuel), and turning life into death.

The best example I have for this right now is a January tomato. It's not right to get tomatoes right now, in January, yet we've built this entirely unsustainable lifestyle around being able to have whatever we want, whenever we want it, at any cost. Even if it means dying. January tomatoes are purely imitation; they aren't even really tomatoes in the true sense of the word. They may look like tomatoes, but they are artificially ripened in a greenhouse. Their growth is sped up to make it to the shelves sooner. They are covered in pesticide. We see a January tomato in a grocery store and we marvel at how technologically advanced we are, when really we are consuming gross misrepresentations of what life was meant to be. January tomatoes are a parody of nature that's been around so long we've forgotten what the natural order of things looks like. A January tomato is a warped version of reality rooted in the our civilization's desires to control all aspects of existence.

When I was younger, I would want to throw up any time after eating fruits and vegetables. I got this sick feeling in my throat, and I would start gagging. I thought the problem was with me, so I stayed away from fruits and vegetables; I assumed I had some weird disorder. Later in life, I had my first tastes of all-natural fruits and vegetables, and I didn't feel like throwing up at all. In fact, I couldn't (and still can't) get enough. I realized at some point that the reason I felt sick after eating is because that is a natural response to being poisoned. I was being poisoned with bad food, pesticide-ridden and pumped full of preservatives. The fruits and vegetables of my childhood - still on the shelves of our grocery stores - were parading as life-giving and healthy when really they were destructive. My body knew this, and I didn't listen. My heart knew this, and I didn't listen. I've made the mistake of not listening to my heart too many times. I think I owe it to myself to start listening.

Adventure Is Out There!

When I was a teenager, I asked my mom if there was a way to touch every part of the earth in your lifetime. She thought about it for a moment, and then told me she didn't think it was possible. The thought made me sad.

Years later, the thought still makes me sad. Most of us will die within 50 miles of where we were born. There is so much out there to see...so, so much. There are endless mountains, snowcapped and silent and cold. There are pristine and unnamed rivers, whose waters have never known the touch of a human hand. I'm at once amazed and disturbed by the thought that there are so many places that humans won't ever touch. There are so many places that I will never touch.

And it's not just the earth. Oh my God, I've been researching the universe lately, and I can't fathom how much there is that we will never see. Sometimes I forget that we are actually in this, this amalgam of dust and light that spans forever. We're the remnants of stardust that's billions of years old, and we're not so much a continuous physical presence as we are an undulating wave of energy. Even our existence is something that flows in and out of the universe. We're constantly on the move because we aren't even we essentially. We're made up of everything, and there's something strange about the fact that the everything we're made up of is often things we will never get to see.

Perhaps I'm suffering from pre-winter wanderlust, knowing I will be spending the majority of the next few months inside. Maybe. But as I reflect back on the question I asked my mom years ago, something tells me that I'm an adventurer at heart, never content to sit back on my haunches and let life happen.

It breaks my heart that there's so much out there that so many of us will never get to experience. Just this past summer, MacKenzie and I saw a particular view of a waterfall on a secluded and obscure trail in the San Juan Forest, and odds are that nobody we know will ever see that waterfall. It makes it special and lonely at the same time. We all want to share beauty with one another. MacKenzie laughs at me whenever we fly because I always get the window seat and I always take tons of pictures of the clouds. I'm just blown away by the fact that this view of clouds has only recently become available to humans because of the awesome development of flight. How much more is out there to be discovered, yet we trap ourselves in payment plans and obligation?

I used to feel so possessive of everything I owned. I needed it to feel like mine and only mine. But I think that was born out of the need to forge my own identity, and lately I feel like I want to see as much beauty as I can before my short time on this earth is up, and I want to show it to as many people as I can. Happiness is only real when shared, and I'm thankful I have MacKenzie to share it with.

Because think about it: all the mountains and rivers and pastures and trails and pathways and deserts and forests and jungles and oceans and seas and reefs and islands and caves and peninsulas and beaches and continents and hills and valleys and cliffs and crashing waves and plateaus and stars and moons and planets and galaxies and meteors and black holes and supernovas and dust of the earth that was forged in the furnace of genesis billions of years ago. We're a part of all of this, and this place is so mysterious and wonderful and, sweet Jesus, vast as all get-out.

I want to see it all. I want to touch as much of it as I can with my own hands. I want to take in as much of this world with all of my senses as I can. There is so much to explore, so much to be found, so much to feel and do and see and taste and hear and smell. This world, this life, this short breath of existence that we have, is a feast for the soul, and I don't want to starve myself of the experiences life has to offer. Think about this: you're going to live your years on this earth, and then you're going to die and never exist again, for the rest of earth's history. The universe is billions of years old, and we're lucky enough to live in the most advanced society ever, and we get time here to explore! If we're fortunate, we may live to be 80 - 8 decades. I'm in my 2nd decade, and I still have so much exploring left to do. I'm getting antsy. Adventure is out there and waiting for us to seize it with vigor - are ya with me?!

There reaches a point in any struggle when the pain becomes almost comical. Perhaps it's the apex of trial. I can remember what it felt like after my dad died. I was laying in bed, two or so months after the funeral, crying my eyes out into a pillow. Suddenly I could see myself from above myself, and it seemed so silly to be so sad. I began chuckling, then laughing, the howling hysterically. I can't explain it. There's something about reaching the highest point of grief that your soul can't take it anymore, and it passes through into a carefree realm. I still miss(ed) my dad, but it's different now.

I feel like I'm reaching that point with teaching. I told MacKenzie yesterday that I feel like I'm approaching the "fuck it" point - the breaking point of my ability to care in the capacities that I have been. Today, I tried to send a student out of my room who was shouting at me because I asked her to sit down. She wasn't responding to my request for her to leave, so I walked to the door to ask for another teacher to help me. She ran in front of me and kicked me three times in the shin, and then stomped on my foot seven times. As she did this, I kept a calm face and demeanor. She wanted to hurt me, and I wasn't going to let her or the other students see that she had done so. But once I got a break later in the day, I checked my shin and there are bruises. It really hurt. The student got three days out-of-school suspension and will be back on Friday.

This student should be seeing a therapist, but budget cuts have caused the local counseling center to cut her therapist's position. She will not be getting a new one. Budget cuts have also caused the tutoring for O.S.S. students to be cut too, so she'll just be hanging out at home for three days. Government. They can send a cruiser to mars but can't get a 9 year-old a therapist.

I am rapidly approaching the point where I will throw up my hands, say, "I tried", and walk away. At this point, just about anything sounds better than being a first-year teacher who is the only fourth-grade teacher in the building, who deals regularly with having things thrown around the room/being assaulted. All those statistics about throngs of new urban teachers quitting within 5 years - I get it now. On the flip side is a strange thought: if I can put up with this, what won't I be able to put up with once this era is over? It's a strange new confidence, like going through the wringer is making me grittier in a good way. I feel like my youthful innocence is being replaced by an adult understanding of the world that will benefit me greatly since I am so young. 23 is young to put up with as much as I do, and in the end I'll be stronger for it, because anything after this will be cake.

But I want that cake, and I want to eat it too. I'm tired of shoveling shit. I've reached the point where, to continue caring at the level I do and in the way that I do, will destroy me. I've reached my capacity for caring. I feel like soon I'll be like Ron Livingston in Office Space. He just stops caring, pushes down his cubicle walls, and everything gets better. He insulates himself from the inanity of his existence by putting up an indefensible wall of "fuck this shit". It's impermeable, and I'm pretty close to building that same wall myself.

Rant

I've been reflecting on the state of us lately. It's become apparent to me that this world is burning. Working within the education system has, more than ever before, opened my eyes to the systemic issues that are crippling our society. Since we live in a globalized society, our culture is indelibly entrenched with the rest of the world. We move like schools of fish; where they go, we go, and vice-versa.

Coming face-to-face with the inequalities of our country every day is taking its toll on me. Most of my students live in government subsidized housing, and many of them are up against more than children their age should ever have to face. Because of this, they are angry. And, since I am the person they spend most of their day with, they unleash their anger on me each day. It's relentless, just wave after wave of receiving the pain of their lives and what I perceive to be the weight of an entire system buckling.

I have been appalled lately by the actions of law enforcement toward those who are peacefully protesting the financial sector's misdeeds. Elderly women pepper sprayed, a pregnant woman miscarrying her baby because of pepper spray, books burned, people trampled, rows upon rows of police officers marching onward, increasing brutality each day. Since 2008, not a single arrest of a banker involved in the economic meltdown, yet Attorney General Eric Holder is telling us we should narc on our neighbors who are illegally downloading music. Priorities, priorities.

The federal government...where to begin. The censorship of the internet with the SOPA act. Declaring pizza a vegetable so schools can keep serving kids shit. The government ok'ing its right to detain indefinitely/assassinate any U.S. citizen. Collecting bargaining rights being stripped right and left. The Patriot Act being extended indefinitely. Student loan debt is now at $1 trillion. Secret wars being conducted. $16 trillion in secret bailouts unaccounted for. CIA drones killing innocent Middle Eastern civilians every day, including teenagers. Surveillance is at an all-time high. There is no end to the depravity.

What disturbs me about all of this is that I am an arm of the federal government. I am a teacher working for a district which is run by the state, which is heavily controlled by funding from the U.S. government. I am at once a recipient of the pain of societal injustice and a willing participant in its perpetuation.

The history of our country is mired with injustice, actually, rooted in injustice. I feel, though, that the injustice is continually coming to light these days, at an unrelenting pace. You and I and a bunch of other people are getting sick of it, too. I keep asking myself, how much more will it take? How much more will we take?

We all work harder these days for less money. The American Dream, false though it always may have been, has finally been shown to be fraudulent. It was a carrot dangled in front of every single person in order to make them feel more complacent; "If today sucks, at least the American Dream tells me I could make it big tomorrow." Welp, turns out, we live in a plutonomy/oligarchy. Opportunity is vaporous, and where there is little opportunity, there is much unrest and much poverty. Bingo.

What I am tired of feeling is disrespected by economic and governmental forces. During times of economic strife, personal rights always take a backseat to property rights as the national mindset turns more survivalist. For instance, my school district is proposing a change that would cause teachers to have to work a full month in order to receive 1, count it, 1 sick day. If we don't work the full month and get sick more than once, we are docked for our pay. We would no longer be salaried employees. More like workers at Kohl's.

I'm tired of all the accoutrements of American life. All the material excess coupled with crushing debt because people want it all, all the propaganda about brash consumerism, all the globalistic panic that has devolved into nothing more than barbaric competition masquerading as civilized "competitive marketplaces", all the government secrets and oppression, all the injustice, all the mass media shibboleth that creates tension to report on the tensions it created. It's all an endless feedback loop of B.S.

Matt Taibbi wrote a great article about the Occupy Wall Street movement a while back for Rolling Stone. In it, he wrote about how OWS is about more than being fed up with the financial injustices being perpetrated every day by corporate suits. It's about being fed up with everything. All of it, the whole American kit-n-kaboodle, the whole ball of wax. They're sick of it, I'm sick of it, and I wonder, how much more will we take?

Working under constant pressure to keep up with day-to-day living, living in concrete jungles when there's so much out there to be explored, living in a country with a completely effed-up health care system, always being one accident away from serious financial woe, all the food we eat coming from the same manufacturers and sold to us in brightly lit warehouses, ugh. It's all so ridiculous when you take a step back and look at it. Always being told what to do, how to do it, who to be, what line not to cross, being threatened with consequence and fear, being boxed into a country that is slowly holding us hostage, working in insane systems that have zero respect for us outside of the economic benefits we can provide. All of us working like madmen to try to make a few more bucks.

/rant