My Hometown

Been thinking.

Been thinking that I hate old fashioned phrases like, “what happened to the…” and “when I was a kid…”

I remember that crock of BS.

I remember how it made me feel small; There was a change in me when I was first told “no” that curdled and frothed and bubbled and brewed and welled up so big that I didn’t know what to do with it. I was a child, but being told no was like being told I couldn’t breathe air. I shook my fists and gnashed my terrible teeth until I was sent to bed without supper.

I remember rebellion. I remember coming face to face with issues I believed in and fighting for them like there was no alternative. I was so hell-bent on being right that I didn’t give two shits about being correct.

I remember being wrong and being proven wrong.

I remember reading facts that blew my mind and changed my life, and my opinion of life, and what life was all about to me. I remember doubting religion, despite being brought up Christian. I remember who I thought Jesus was supposed to be.

I remember learning from my own wrong doings, and actually rehearsing ways to swallow that giant fucking lump in my throat that said, “You know, you’re wrong,” choking back tears and trying to maintain perspective after I was caught stealing, and vandalizing property. I remember being such a little shit.

But I learned, somehow. And since then there has been a shift.

There is a rising of a generation that I am now so heavy-handedly a part of: the selfie-stick-wielding, drone-flying, online-trolling, soapbox-preaching, youtube-shaming, bully generation of today- and I am not proud of it. I don’t want to be a part of it. And yet, I know that I somehow helped create it.

It’s a fucking monster.

Through our computer screens, it’s become overtly apparent that we exist now in a multi-generational gathering of people who have been convinced by the world-wide nature of what we have in front of our fingertips, (a keyboard and a shitty social network,) that what we may hold dear in our own hearts and minds is something that we should also force upon the people around us.

But that’s ridiculous. IT’S NOT TRUE.

Currently, we are living in a sad online world where feminists are attacking other feminists for being incorrectly feminist…

Where the only way to stop angry people with guns is to own more guns to kill them with first…

Where white people can’t possibly understand, or feel remorse for what happened to their black friends, and their black friends are ostracized by their other black friends for having white friends who can’t possibly relate…

Where a trans kid can’t read the bible because he/she is trans, and it just doesn’t add up in God’s eyes…

It’s all completely fucked, and it’s all “the word of the web.”

** We’re so privileged to have such rapid access to information, and tragically, we’re using it to incite the wrong reactions. We have the ability to snap a picture of ourselves and instantly filter it to look better, but when it comes to words, we seem to have zero filter at all. I wonder why we don’t try to make ourselves look as good as we do in our selfies? **

We live in a world of keywords, hashtags and crappy, inconsiderate opinions- it seems to me that in a lot of cases, we’ve completely lost the plot. And through it all, we’re starting to lose room for compassion. For empathy. We all come from different places, and different walks of life, but the goal is right there on the horizon, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that even in our faults, we all seem to be aware of the need for change as a new generation: That we should forget our differences and lend a helping hand.

Don’t trip each other up as we stride toward something better.

When I was a kid, I remember picking each other up off the blacktop when we fell down. 

What happened to that?