Skip to main content

Angry Youth


When I was young I was often angry. Angry about how I felt slighted, by one thing or another mostly. Angry about injustice. Angry that children didn’t have rights, that we could be conscripted to fight and die by a political system we didn’t have a voice in.

This anger gave me strength and it gave me power. It drove me toward the political system, not away from it, and I determined at a young age that I would become the youngest and angriest president ever.

The anger wasn’t directed toward any one person and it wasn’t driven by evil. It was anger directed toward enabling positive change in the world. Our country had just pulled out of Vietnam, Nixon had just resigned office, and no-one seemed to know what was next except the inevitable nuclear holocaust and societal collapse that so many people were prophesying.

Into this mix I saw the world as a place that needed help. I lashed out and took swipes. At times I was taken down, “put in my place”, by adults who were less angry but stronger than I was. I ran for student council in High School but that was a farce. I voted as soon as I turned 18 but then, in the mists of life and the pea-soup-fog of booze, I drew back and grew less angry.

As I aged I lamented not keeping that fire burning longer, Though I didn’t stay involved in politics and counter-culture activism, I look with envy on the movements of our recent history. If I were younger I would have been an Anarchist, a member of the The Anonymous group activities. I am currently a huge Greta Thunberg fan. In our current political-separatist-state I wish more than anything that there was a viable third-party. Maybe someday there will be. For now, I am just getting angry again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life Changing

It is hard to explain how I feel, now that I have found my calling. I remember when I was a little boy and my dad used to say how much he loved his work, how he was always excited about it, and how it didn’t feel like work to him. As I grew older I envied him, and anyone else who had that experience, because I didn’t share the sentiment for most of my adult life. Let me be clear, I never hated my job. I just didn’t feel like it was what I was supposed to be doing. I felt that there was something much more important that I should be doing with my life than working for someone else. And now, having finished my first book and being well on my way with writing my second, I am loving every moment of it. The most amazing thing about writing, for me, is that I can spin off on tangents and follow rabbit holes and when I am done, as long as I come back to somewhere near the surface where I started, no one knows that it wasn’t a perfectly orchestrated writing technique that I had plan...
Post a Comment
Read more

Writer's Block

Beginning to write can seem daunting at times. The process of deciding what to write about can cause a great deal of anxiety as you stare at the blank page or white screen. As it is also a very exciting prospect, having the opportunity to start and create something outside of your own self, finding the words to start can be difficult. One thing that I like to do is to write about how I am feeling, describing the anxiety and the discouragement, and forgetting that I am actually writing at all. I start to yell at the page, in angry exclamations, about how the experience scars me and makes me want to scream. Eventually I get to a point where I realize that I have cleared the block, unfrozen the stream, begun building the setting and have expressed myself without even realizing that I was doing it. Then I look around me, nervous that the others on the bus may think me weird for the contortions and scowls I have been throwing at the computer...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Truth

My childhood was not normal. I had many unusual opportunities and life experiences; I grew up on a pseudo-ranch with a cow named hamburger and we lived in a caboose for part of the year. I was fortunate to have a loving family and I was given opportunities for which I am forever grateful. I was curious and sensitive to my own feelings and the feelings of others, a trait that is not common in all young boys. I may not have been the most well-behaved kid but I was careful to try and not hurt anyone, and when I did I felt awful about it and I made amends as best as I could. I was never afraid to tell the truth. This book is a testament to that. I can’t say it was easy - telling the truth never is - but I grew more confident each time I told a story that hurt me in the first telling. Each subsequent story, no matter how painful, became more and more important for me to tell. I didn’t write under an alias, a pen name, to hide my identity. I originally decided to do it because I d...
Post a Comment
Read more