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Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy

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Author : Gholdy Muhammad Publisher : ISBN : 1338594893 Publication Date : -- Language : Pages :

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INTRODUCTION

I am an asshole.

I also like to think that sometimes I can put events and thoughts to words in a way that might make people laugh - or perhaps sometimes just make people think. I’ve never really been afraid to say what’s on my mind, unless of course my self-confidence or image would be brought into question. I’ve never really found myself too gifted in any regard.

This has made pursuing any kind of artistic endeavor rather challenging, which isn’t to say that this particular collection of words will be some kind of grand artistic endeavor. It’s been hard to want to attach my name to any piece of creativity that I’ve come up with on my own. I’ve scrapped countless poems, I’ve tried my hand at writing fiction only to succumb to my own self-doubt, and I’ve never found myself to have a natural inclination towards visual art.

Yet, lately I’ve been kind of obsessed with the idea of leaving an impact. Perhaps I’ve just come into contact with my own mortality too many times by the age of eighteen. Perhaps I feel as if I’m starting to lose some of that supposed shine I had when I was even younger than I am now. Perhaps I’m deathly afraid of losing an inner glow that tells me to get my feelings out into the world. Perhaps I’m just simply in the mood to write.

There’s a weird sort of self-serving nature that I feel I have to overcome in even attempting to write in essay form. I don’t think of myself as a ‘writer’ and I’m fairly certain I’ll never be able to call myself that. Even if I end up thinking this collection is worth offering for money I’ll still never be comfortable with that label. For me, typing away my thoughts has simply been the most immediately blissful release of emotion and pent-up idealism that I’ve ever done. From the time I was small and had access to a computer connected to the internet, commenting and critiquing was something I loved doing. I’ve thought about dipping into other realms in order to express my opinions, yet nothing feels precisely as correct as letting my fingers walk across a keyboard.

However, there’s always been a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that these pursuits altogether were a waste of time. I’d get excited about some undoubtedly amateur attempt at creating songs or videos and perhaps not get the response I’d want from somebody I knew personally. A lot of the time, it was a simple case of nobody being interested. I was doing things that other, older, more talented people were doing. I wasn’t willing to attach my real name to any sort of product online – the primary reason being that I was far too young to even be pursuing any kind of real-life artistic pursuit or online business. This would stonewall any sort of inspirational or creative drive I would experience, and real life quickly soon crept back into the picture – seemingly ending any hope of escaping to a life driven by creativity (in my dramatic little grade-school mind).

Transitioning back to the present day, a cascading wave of apathy and self-doubt clouds my drive as it stands today. It doesn’t always grab, and on nights like this one I feel myself free of its clutches and with an ever-comforting desire to put my thoughts onto paper. I don’t think these writings are any artistic achievement – perhaps they’re even things everybody already knows. I intend for them to be a snapshot of not only my life at the current moment but also a place for me to interject my thoughts into that snapshot. The collection not only acting as a recording tool for events and thoughts, but as a platform for others to potentially ask themselves the same questions I do.

---

ON “FRIEND DIVIDE”

One of the most incredibly difficult things in trying to write from experience is simply the fact that I haven’t had much of it. Rather, I’d like these writings to portray not the man who’s seen it all and believes he knows all about life – but the kid who is still eager and awaiting all of the lessons and inevitable socks in the mouth he will receive from life. These years are bitter, unforgiving, and generally just a giant pain in the ass. These writings help me deal with some of the more emotional, age-specific matters that tend to arise when transitioning into adulthood.

Relationships are hard. Yes, I’m definitely referring to an always present deathly sense of never being good or presentable enough to attract women. However, I’m also referring to regular, emotional, interpersonal friendships and why they also are terrible minefields of social awkwardness and square pegs not fitting into circular holes. Living as a student transitioning into adulthood is perhaps the pinnacle messy experience anyone can ever go through. As I’ve come to be into the dawn of pretending like I know what I’m talking about, I can tell you that maintaining the seemingly endless large group of buddies that you may have amassed in grade school is rightfully impossible.

A lot of people like to claim that other people never change. Particularly, they use this to refer to other people who have previously wronged them who they like to believe will maintain a cartoonishly evil glow throughout their entire lives. Some people, on the other hand, are born genuinely cartoonishly evil and will take any advantage they can get to take advantage of some people.

Regardless, this notion is complete bullshit.

There is a portion of one’s life where everyone changes – puberty. It’s easy to think of puberty as a magical snap of the finger that brings about the defining physical transformation and hormonal pulverizing. However, puberty is the time in your life where you form the ideals that will end up shaping you for the rest of your life. I’m not entirely sure of the changes that’ll occur in my brain chemistry from the time I write this onward – but I know for a fact that they’ll happen.

I’ll end up hating things I currently adore and I’ll ending up coming around on things that make me want to punch walls. I’ll fall in love with people and I’ll lose interest. I’ll experience the worst and best times in my life several times over. I’m eighteen years old.

There’s no way to expect two people to maintain compatibility over the course of ten-plus years, especially not two children who are learning who they are every day. Again, it might sound as if I’m stating the obvious, but it doesn’t just refer to when you’re a tween. Half of all married couples divorce.  Adults in their thirties and forties can’t maintain compatibility for that long.

I think part of me is so hellbent on writing it over and over again because I need to remember it myself.  Even though you might have done something in the past that you feel endless guilt over, just know that in the grand scheme of your life the time it took to do it must’ve been pretty small. There’s seemingly infinite time to meet new people to love in ways you couldn’t in the past. There’s seemingly endless opportunities to put yourself out into the world to make up for the time you spent in your own comfort. You have your whole life to live – the separation of two objects in space is simply just another event. Worse yet, the separation of two people intertwined is pretty damn common.

---

ON COLLEGE

I’ve been conditioned for the last eighteen years to believe that college was basically Mecca. I think this is a main condition behind the college subset of hippie. I’m almost positive that when I get to university, there’ll be a rather large set of people who believe that they’ve already made the pilgrimage to that Mecca, and they’ll walk around conditioned to believe they’re martyrs.

Yet I’m far more positive that college will amount to many more sets of people than just that. It’ll be a completely different kind of paradise that I haven’t been able to truly appreciate yet – an ideologically free, incredibly diverse playground of education and culture in a city I’ll admire every morning. I’m positive I’ll fall in love countless times when I go to college. I’m positive I’ll bask in the relative freedom I’ll be equipped with.

I say ‘relative freedom’ because I know for a fact that I’ll still be under obligation to take countless classes and pay back endless amounts of money to my university. I’ll be finally at this perceived golden-gate palace of higher knowledge and fruitful economic returns in the future. It won’t feel like it, however.

Part of the reason I opened up this entry with the Hippius collegius profile was to emphasize just how dramatic of a pitch that university was to me and many of my peers growing up. I quickly set my own goals of wanting to go to a four-year, competitive university. Through my grade schooling I had thought that this was potentially the most noble goal ever, and that if I kept my schooling up well enough to do this that I would be pretty much set for the rest of my life. Now I'd like to ask you to fast-forward to my senior year of high school; to the time of writing this very entry.

I’m generally all set to attend university in the fall. I’ve been accepted and getting student aid issues sorted out as early as two hours before writing this. Not only has this idea of university being some ultimate grand achievement all but left my brain - but it’s been replaced with bitter resentment towards how the system is run today and immeasurable empathy for all of those that still carve out a happy, kind, emotionally gratifying life despite not attending.

There is zero reason – count it – zero reason for any student attending a four year university to be drowning in debt for the rest of the foreseeable (and unforeseeable) future. Especially not in one of the richest countries in the world.

(If you’re reading these in chronological order, you’ll notice a general theme of distaste for the current domestic policies of the United States of America. If that’s going to offend you, put the book down. Close the e-reader window you have open right now. It’s only going to get more vulgar from here.)

In countries where citizens experience just about the closest thing to a utopia they possibly could from birth to death (read: European democratic-socialist nations), and just about everywhere else in the developed world, this a completely unheard of problem. See, in America, we’ve found it fit to not only inject a blind love of capitalism into our brains with propaganda from the time we’re born – we’ve found it fit to inject that same capitalism into the very infrastructure of society.

I know, I know, I’m being dramatic. Universities offer service upon service, and to believe that they should be outright free is preposterous. Every college I’ve looked at in my search is lovely, and I have no doubt that any college in spitting distance of a major city will provide top-notch resources to make my next few years better.

But for $20,000 - $50,000 a year?

I’m going to be completely honest with you.

“That’s the point of the whole book, stupid!”, you scream at me from afar.

I haven’t done anywhere near close to enough research to say that I’d even have one of the answers of how to minimize this cost. I’m nowhere close to an economic theorist and I barely have a leg to stand on when it comes to any sort of discussion of economic policy. What I will tell you is what I see and know to be true in my heart.

Even being a diehard football fan - watching major colleges essentially exert free, gruesome, future-brain-injury-inducing labor from children who they don’t even have the gall to pay gets me queezy.

“But the colleges pay for their education!” you continue incessantly, moving closer to me this time but still keeping the same volume. “They put food on their table!”

That was only until four years ago in 2014, when Shabazz Napier threatened to give the NCAA major terrible PR by admitting that athletes go to bed hungry. In near-immediate response, the NCAA enacted a rule that every player was allowed unlimited meals at their universities. The NCAA has been around since 1906.

This should give you some idea as to how realistically that universities portray their students’ financial and social background. Modern day universities can’t even be bothered to give a shit about whether their future star athletes have enough on their plate. How can they possibly be fit to regulate or have any arm in regulating the cost of a four-year degree to an average American citizen?

Not only have you and I been conditioned to believe that college is this amazing, end-all-be-all world-fixer, but we’ve been conditioned to believe that its cost is justified by the tremendous success you’ll have once you leave that building with a degree. Now, it seems we can’t really even bank on that anymore.

Keep in mind I haven’t written this to sway you off the idea of attending university. I’m attending it myself later this year, and I’m incredibly excited for it. Where I’m writing this from is a place of what I feel to be realism. A relevant college degree will make you look better in a job search – that’s entirely true. If you’re lucky enough to attend a college like I’ll be attending, there may even be programs to help secure you with post-college work.  I want anybody reading this to know that while it’s a noble goal, your life will continue without college. It will be glorious, full of love, work, pain, and experience. It’ll absolutely still be worth living.

---

ON DRUGS

(haha,  “on drugs”)

I hadn’t planned on writing another entry so soon after my last. I’m writing these all chronologically and I’d literally just thought to myself that this book may in fact never get done. It seems that in situations where I’m gifted all the free time that one could ever want, I usually tend to be as lazy as humanly possible. Two prompts in two days is like Speed Racer compared to the time it normally takes me to have the motivation to type. However, Donald J. Trump and company have graciously provided me with several opportunities to just get straight-up mad throughout the last year. Nothing bounces around vicious words in my head as ping pong balls quite like the Trump administration. I plan to delve into this deeper at some point in the book, but for now I’m just using it as a segue.

Today, Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration would be rolling back the policy that allowed legal marijuana to take off in certain states.

Now, I like marijuana. Anybody who knows me personally will be able to tell you that. Yet, it’s not just the psychoactive qualities that I’m a fan of. I feel it has genuine, documented medical uses and deserves to be openly available to all citizens of the United States. You may laugh at my aforementioned laziness and link that to my liking of marijuana, but just keep in mind that I was a top-tier procrastinator long before pot and I ever came into contact.

I didn’t write this to sing my praises of a plant. I didn’t write this to try and desperately convince a reader that they should ease up on their viewpoints about marijuana (that’s already happening, and in large numbers). I wanted to write this to let out my absolute disgust for how the United States has handled the War on Drugs. Marijuana is simply the best talking point for this.

I want you to honestly visualize everything marijuana does to a person. If you’ve never truly experienced that (either first or second-hand), just read along. Part of the reason that the War on Drugs was able to be so “successful” is because many Americans had little to no clue what the drugs in question actually did. This allowed them to be preached incorrect ideas about drugs that they didn’t know anything about – and didn’t want to learn about. Now, if you can picture it accurately, I want you to make a mental note of everything a normal human-sized dose of marijuana does to the mind and body. It’s different for every person, however these are some key points that usually come up every time.

- Decreased reaction time

- Impaired motor skills

- Euphoria

- Amnesia

- Light headedness

- Laughter; finding everything funny

Now there are more physical effects than that, however I wanted to focus more on mental effects in this exercise – it’ll be relevant to the second part of the exercise.

Alright, so now that we’ve made a little internal list of marijuana side effects, I want you to think of the last substance you consumed that could be considered psychoactive. For all reading this besides Hippius collegius, that’s probably alcohol.  They maintain a lot of similarity in the effect that they have on the human brain. Anyone who’s done both can tell you that they in fact aren’t the same, one feels much different than the other. How so?

Well, one requires you to be constantly filling your insides with liquid. Depending on your previous experience in putting ungodly amounts of this fiery, bitter liquid directly into your stomach, you may just end up projectile vomiting. As if that wasn’t sweet enough, we’ve now been trained as a people to never let an incoherently drunk person alone. If we did that, there’s a well-documented chance that they would end up choking to death on their own vomit.

Yet marijuana doesn’t exactly have the best rebuttal in this regard. The most well-known way to ever consume cannabis is smoking, obviously. The non-addictive brand of massive damage that cigarettes does to your lungs is through the smoke, not the nicotine. So, in a way, smoking pot is just as bad as drinking and smoking cigarettes in terms of physical health repercussions, right?

That would be all well and good, except it doesn’t work out that way in the real world. Modern medical marijuana shacks are set up with countless non-psychoactive and non-smoking products. Consumer-grade products to turn the cannabis plant into vapor or into food exist and are tremendously easy to use. Most medical marijuana states aren’t even physically allowed to sell plant-based marijuana for combustion - or at least I know my home state of Pennsylvania isn’t yet.

I see nobody on the planet vaporizing their beer to make sure that they can still get some alcohol without suffering immediate damage to their digestive tract. I see nobody on the planet dismantling their cigarettes to try and get the purest nicotine they can so they can throw it in some brownies and relieve their joint pain or maybe get to sleep. I do, however, keep seeing a country completely willing to do this illegally because they as a unit have realized that the United States’ previous stance on marijuana was just plain silly.

Enter Jeff Sessions. (That’s usually never a good thing.)

Not to sound disrespectful - OK, to sound completely disrespectful, Jeff Sessions’ way of thinking would be more akin to witch trial-era Salem, Massachusetts than 2018 America. Sessions has a disarming country drawl and an agenda that makes lobbyists’ mouths water. Like many in the Trump administration, he’s willing to dance to just about anything for a paycheck. Regurgitating old tobacco and alcohol industry propaganda is child’s play to a puppet of this magnitude. Like most every issue that the majority of Americans seem to agree on, Sessions and the rest of the Kremlin-sponsored gang of cretins will take whatever opportunity they can to spit on the will of the majority. It’s 2018, I’m eighteen years old, and when I hear someone compare marijuana to heroin my brain doesn’t jump anywhere but the word ‘corruption’ or ‘stupid’. I’m willing to wager that it’s the same for anyone else in America my age who has done even a tiny sliver of research.

Then again, what would it matter if Sessions knew that he was overselling the dangers of marijuana to near-Reagan levels of fear mongering? He probably already knows he’s talking out of his ass - he just doesn’t care. You see, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence and taste of the American public. Sessions and every cronie like him knows that the voter base that they aim to please will buy anything and everything he says as long as it comes out of the mouth of someone who will pretend to reason that they’re taking the moral high ground (or the mouth of someone who simply just disagrees with a Democrat). Trump, Sessions, Tillerson, Bannon, and every other decrepit old white guy that flyover states and 4chan idolize could tell them that the sky was green and they’d go out and check. Worse yet, when they saw it was blue, they’d either:

A: Rationalize why their dear leader could’ve possibly been mistaken by basic facts and logic. (eg. “It’s his first time! He’s not a politician! Give him a break!”)

B: Deny, deny, deny. You see, Trump didn’t tell a lie when he said the sky was green, he simply was reporting what he knew. Actually, the sky was green until 1994 when Bill Clinton raped it into being blue. Or maybe it was his wife. Or Obama, yeah, it was probably Obama who changed the color of the sky right after he was born in Kenya.

To avoid completely running into a tangent, I want to ask any person who’s leans towards either party to ask themselves what their inhibitions against recreational drugs are. You may not use a single drug recreationally and just avoid every single one on principle.

Hey, more power to you. Hard drugs can and will tear families apart each and every single day. America is facing an opioid epidemic unlike any epidemic seen in this country since smoking and obesity were such hot-button issues. However, this section of people who make up opioid addicts aren’t typically the junkies you might be portraying. Yes, heroin is killing a record number of people, but most of them are just simply innocent victims who were prescribed way too much oxycontin and needed a way to keep the pain away after their prescription ran out. There is no ultra-evil ring of junkies and dealers that keep themselves running out of pure hatred for clean American families. Drugs themselves are not this all-pervasive evil that many Republicans make them out to be. Many dealers and users are just normal, average, everyday people with either a monetary goal that they absolutely have to meet (sometimes instigated by terrible American policies) or normal people who suddenly found themselves chemically dependent on a horrible, life-sucking substance.

Either way, harsh jail time and public scolding is so far from the correct way to deal with this epidemic. The War on Drugs is having a sneaky re-emergence under Republican leadership, and America should be absolutely terrified. It’ll be more money wasted on trying to fix the legitimate problems of everyday people on advertising campaigns that don’t do shit, rehab programs which rob addicts of their money and willpower, and endless propaganda to make your grandma believe that marijuana is as bad as heroin or cocaine. It'll be far, far too many more nonviolent drug offenders carrying out modern day slave labor for private prisons.

Nobody my age or slightly older that isn’t a drone on Twitter believes any of that anymore. Drugs have won the War on Drugs. This Republican administration isn’t even entirely interested in trying to convince you of anything about drugs on the whole. They’re interested in throwing money to try and make one particular drug go away. Isn’t it shocking that the drug companies that the government do like and tax exorbitantly want this one specific one lumped in with heroin?

No one in that administration is interested in a real solution to the opioid epidemic. If they truly were, they’d see the non-existent results of the Reagan era campaigns to lessen drug usage and say “well, I guess we have to do something else besides making catchy little advertisements.” They’re looking at it in ways they think could help fuel the fear mongering around marijuana that existed sixty years ago. They’re looking at it in ways they think could help fuel a re-emergence of the War on Drugs. They’re paranoid that the American people are coming around on this one drug that they used to desperately want you to believe was the spawn of Satan (and they are). They’re thinking of ways they could lessen the number of people addicted to opioids while not getting anybody to pay attention to the number of people addicted to nicotine and alcohol while also dismissing decriminalization as a silly way to lessen that number. They’re interested in themselves and their buddies. They’re interested in the way things always were. They don’t care about what you think would be a real way to end this crisis. They just.

Don’t.

Care.

---

ON “HALF-RACISM”

It’s hard to coin new terminology. Everything that could’ve already been said to describe something has already been said, seemingly. However, there occasionally exists the problem which is so new to modern society that it begs to be defined by something other than typical vernacular. One of these issues is what I like to call ‘half-racism’, which I believe is a more apt way to try and describe the complacent bits of racism that still sneakily exist in 2018 America.

Keep in mind while reading this that I don’t mean for this phrase to be a replacement for institutionalized racism. That is an incredibly well-documented phenomena that shows how deeply our once socially acceptable racist beliefs permeated not only our American culture, but continues to disenfranchise thousands upon thousands of people all over the United States.

I’d like to believe that people in America, on the whole, are not racist. Largely, every American simply doesn’t have the time, money, capacity, or desire to give a flying fuck about the ethnicity of other Americans. This is the way it’s usually always been with the majority of Americans. Yet, a defining collection of old stereotypes and generalizations tend to rear their head in the homes of genuine people who wouldn’t dream (or care enough to) interfere in the lives of somebody outside of their ethnicity.

I call this group of ideals “half-racism”. Half-racism represents the un-noteworthy, abnormally timid form of racism left in homes across America. This form of racism has been left out to rot in the sun from eras in which the beliefs were considered socially acceptable. This form of racism - I hypothesize, at least - was a large part of Donald Trump’s success in the most recent election. Sure, his ethical beliefs were disgusting to most people, but to another group of people they were refreshing. There was finally a person going to take office who represented not only the more inherently violent racists, but the more systematically bred racists as well.

This voter group - this forgotten group of flyover voters - represent peak half-racism. Analytics and statistics may make Trump voters seem rather inhumane. It’s easy to stay in your own bubble on Reddit or some other equal site (as I fall victim to, sometimes) and view this group of voters as a largely hateful, blatantly racist, xenophobic group of pitchfork-wielding white people. However, most of these people aren’t klansmen holding protest signs or tiki torches. Most of these people are simply American citizens who were born and raised in households that held traditionally racist beliefs. As the most radical of xenophobic behavior is passed down from parent to child, so is the more timid form of racism. The kind that doesn’t seek to actively remove any person from existence; it’s a kind that has no desire for an ethnic cleansing or for a coup d’etat of the traditional social values that have come to define modern American life. Each one of these people are genuine Americans that have made a living just like any of the rest of us - they were just raised to blame Mexicans and use other xenophobic reasoning for the economic struggles of the country. When Trump got full-on hateful with his rhetoric against illegal immigration, sure, the absolute racists of this country were eager with anticipation to go online and preach that there was finally a man who saw the light. Yet, there was an even larger group of people - the ‘half-racists’ - who had no desire to finally be able to slander the Hispanic American in public. They were just happy a Presidential candidate was able to see the same solution to problems that they had been raised to believe was the one of the only solutions to our economic struggle - the removal of undocumented immigrants. These people were probably genuine Americans born with no undoctored hate in their blood. These people probably have empathy and genuine concern for the well-being of immigrants coming to America in search of a better life. They just have a misguided perception that removing the undocumented immigrants that are already here will magically fix the American economy, creating more jobs for the people who previously had them “stolen” from them.

I believe this notion is completely false, but as are many that come to make up the mind of an average American voter. There’s hardly any space left in the mind of someone who identifies as a voter of one of either of the main two parties. Perhaps it’s just a flaw of party identity in general, but attaching oneself unabashedly to a certain allegiance means that you are signing up for the views commonly shared - no matter how those views shift and evolve over time. Democrats have firmly stood in support of maintaining a safe and prosperous transition for illegal immigration. Republicans have traditionally taken a harder line, emphasizing border security and harder checks on immigrants entered even legally. However, when this latest shift in tone came directly from the mouth of the soon-to-be President of the United States, nearly every person was at a genuine mental crossroads as to what would be the correct way to interpret it.

The key issue that Democrats missed during the campaign trail was that the Republican braintrust knew that Democratic voters would hate Republican voters explicitly simply because of the man heading their party. Even in the most mainstream news sources, there was a simple overlooking of basic reasons why Trump may end up winning people’s hearts and minds. More than any other reason for this may be simple party allegiance. Trump fueled anger against the blue side with constant nicknames and sound bytes. By turning the Presidential race into a football game, the team with the craziest fans ended up winning. Another key factor in my eyes was simply the weakness of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She came off as incompatible to a group of (undeservedly) poor people who felt that they had been overlooked in the past eight years. It was the perfect time to take an ever-shrinking middle class people and educate them as to why heightened defense and anti-immigration spending would do the opposite of economic benefit. Yet, they largely chose to attack Trump’s character and actions, justifying the vote of the Republican.

Whether this class of people was legitimately overlooked isn’t much of a question. A large chunk of Trump’s dedicated fan base is poor. Poor people have been overlooked in America since long before I was born. The anger and frustration in the hearts of these people was completely real and genuine. Rather than tapping into this as a potential way to hook voters to an ideology that they may haven’t have previously considered, Clinton’s team played into the anger. This weakness of platform was exploited during the primaries, as Bernie Sanders’ message of genuine reform and progress in Washington captured the hearts of far more young people around me than Clinton’s message of “let’s elect anybody but Donald Trump.”

However, another way that Trump was able to swing enough of the electoral college was through half-racism. Don’t get me wrong here, Donald Trump’s remarks throughout his campaign and presidency have been full-on racist. It seems that every word that comes out of his mouth about another race of people stumbles into a giant pile of xenophobic needles.

Hearing a sentiment such as Trump’s now infamous Mexican immigration statement towards the front-end of his campaign sent shockwaves of disgust throughout mine and every other racially-aware thinker’s spine. Contrarily, when countless legions of now ridiculed and socially outcast half-racists heard this, they felt as if their worldview was suddenly justified. There was a wave of relief and good feelings that went up to at least half of their brain. Maybe they had grown up hearing a parental sentiment that all Mexicans were lazy freeloaders looking for an easy ride all the time. No matter how that seed was planted in their brain, Don watered it.

Regardless of the size of that seed, Donald’s anti-immigration rhetoric appealed to the senses of many unhappy Republican voters. Potential Republican voters were willing to put up with his ad hominem attacks to candidates and citizens. They were just concerned that this man would push legislature that they thought was key to reclaiming income equality. They were just concerned that illegal immigrants would be taken care of, and they believe that removing those immigrants will bring back jobs and money in the country like no one could have previously imagined. Whether that idea or any other similar idea would really benefit the country is up for anyone’s interpretation. Yet, there was something undeniably appealing to Republican voters about the way Trump seemed to go against the status quo. He wasn’t referring to illegal immigrants in careful tone. He wasn’t dwelling on the potential weight of his words before he said them. He simply was laying into an entire group of people that live in the country, vowing to his voter base that he would take care of them once and for all.

Here’s the thing though. Love is one of the most exploitable emotions in human history. There’s countless examples - both having taken place historically and in fiction - that discuss how people can take advantage of that feeling of love. Someone who is completely dumbstruck by how in love they are is easy to use to your own advantage. Worse than this, hate is almost certainly far easier to exploit than love.

Donald Trump’s actions will forever be excusable in the minds of those who still ride the Trump Train because he was the chosen one in their eyes. His keyboard army quickly learned to adore the fluorescent orange man, chomping at the bit to hear his every word and typographically yell at all naysayers. Why? Because he played into their hate. He rounded up all the half-racists (and all the full-on-racists), and said, “Come, my children. Together, we will take back the country which you love so dearly. How? Well, we’ll take it back from all those dirty ol’ Mexicans! We’ll build a wall, and pump thousands upon thousands of dollars into Border Patrol and ICE, and sooner than you know it the country will be great again!”

---

ON CRITICISM AND RUSSIAN TROLLS

Criticism is useful. Additionally, in this incredibly sensitive internet age, it’s becoming almost simultaneously necessary and intolerable. Whether it be on art or society itself, it seems as though the internet has bred this most ridiculous volatile stance that any and all criticism directed at something they like translates to a direct attack on their character. There is seemingly little divide anymore between the people, places, things, and ideas one person enjoys and the person itself. Not only has this resulted in perhaps the most vicious and outwardly hateful of any presidential election in the history of the institution, but it also turns innocent commentary on art and events into all-out attacks (with the most vicious side usually being crowned the winner).

When most critique critics, they’re usually up in arms about one particular reviewer or publication that reacted unfavorably to something they enjoy. You see this near-constantly on the internet in 2018, where fans will argue the most minute details of a piece of art until they’re blue in the face. It’s become such an inherently violent circlejerk that notable online critics have been scared to even review certain pieces of media from certain franchises. There’s no telling how many death threats you’ll receive by trying to convey the notion to Star Wars fans that The Last Jedi may have in fact - not been the worst thing to ever happen in the history of Star Wars. There’s no telling how many death threats you’ll receive by trying to convey your opinion that the latest overhyped triple-A video game disappointment may have actually been genuinely fun to you.

Keep in mind, I don’t think this is necessarily indicative of a genuinely large-scale shift in collective consciousness. I think it’s another unfortunate side effect of mankind’s greatest achievement. It’s incredibly easy to look at a group of people reacting loudly and controversially online to a certain political happening and automatically group everybody who holds similar positions into that. Not only is this perhaps one of the easiest fallacies to fall into in the age of Twitter, it’s one that I genuinely feel does the most harm of any way of thinking at the current moment. It’s why, in my pitiless & fruitless Twitter crusade against the current administration, I try and keep the ad hominem attacks on the people who voted it in to a minimum. Lobbing humorous insults towards governmental power is largely harmless. Lobbing vicious, hateful insults towards another group of Americans is inherently problematic.

Criticism has devolved. This brand of ultra-personal “criticism” has largely taken over the collective mouth of society, with us much more comfortable and far less concerned after we sling an insult towards a dissenter online. This benefits enemies - personal enemies who revel in our outburst of anger and hatred, and enemies of American peace and prosperity who use this infighting as ‘proof’ that Democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Countless Russians shacked up in a human crate near the Kremlin spend the majority of their day on social media sites trolling for any and every opportunity they have to embrace chaos. This is what mainly enters my mind when I say that this new-age disregard for constructive criticism and peaceful discussion is perhaps the most harmful byproduct of social media and the internet at large.

What can one possibly do, however, do encourage peaceful discussion? How do you find the most adamantly loyal Trump train drone (assuming they’re a legitimate American) and the most adamantly passionate anti-Trump twitter drone (assuming they’re also a legitimate American) and get them to peacefully coexist? One method which I’ve been increasingly afraid that the government will go through with is the ‘common enemy’ method, which is a deliberate and simple as it sounds. Before going about and calling me some kind of false-flag propagating Alex Jones-tier conspiracy nut, don’t think of the idea of a “false flag” as completely ridiculous. Sure, the fact that some people so desperately want to believe that the murder of innocent elementary school children in Connecticut has a legitimate grand scheme behind it that they’ll involve the government as potential perpetrators is both absolutely pitiful and downright disgraceful to the graves and memories of those lost. These theories are especially laughable when given the atypical “muh false flag” reasoning which is “It’s the Democrats! They’re coming to take our guns!” (Nevermind the fact that they elected a man who is on record saying he wants to take guns.) You’ll notice the sudden halt of any and all nightmare Democrats coming for Republican voters’ assault rifles as soon as Republicans take major office. The mass shootings still happen, though - weirdly enough.

No, I’d like to extend this “common enemy” theory to include not only the near-impossible scenario of a public terror attack completely staged by a sovereign nation’s government - but also the scenario of willful ignorance and diversion. After the tragedy that was September 11th, (and keep in mind this is being written from the perspective of somebody that wasn’t even two years old - take my historical account with a grain of salt) I think it can be generally agreed upon that the immediate response of invading Iraq and Afghanistan seemed hasty at best and absolutely diversionary and opportunistic at worst. We were chasing a man found in Pakistan in two countries that had nearly nothing to do with the actual tragedy that took place. I’m beginning to get worried that the Trump administration could view the growing social unrest in America as an excuse to manifest some more destiny and indulge in a little more neocolonialism - and by that I mean rape an area of its resources and stick a diplomatic arm into a country that never needed and never wanted the presence of the American military. What better way to drum up universal support than to give everybody in America a universal enemy?

However, this would be far from easy to undertake. Vietnam and (eventually) the Iraq and Afghanistan War faced its share of vocal opposition, and a sudden shift in tone towards military strength and superiority would set off alarm bells in the minds of I and nearly every other critical thinker that doesn’t blindly support the decisions made by their nation’s government. Yet - and don’t think I can’t steer this essay in the right direction - if that decision were to come down, how would there be any sort of unified response to it? What would prevent the countries representing disinformation agents currently invading Instagram and Twitter every day from simply spending more money and beefing up the number of bots to propagate whatever message they deemed necessary to their advancement? Who would be the regulatory agency with enough balls to stop it? Facebook? Psh, please, because they did such an amazing job getting Russia’s collective wet willie out of the country’s ears. They did such a great job of stopping disinformation, half of the country believed (and ‘criticized’ the other side for ignoring the ‘facts’) that the Democratic candidate was going to pass out and die any day. They do such a fantastic job of promoting dissenting world views that they actually announced overhauls to the way timelines worked that would make specifically targeting news stories towards people already in certain bubbles even easier. Facebook loves that disinformation money. Facebook is actively working to make sure people don’t see constructive criticism of any one of their own world views. Facebook is very close to becoming a plague upon modern society.

Yet, even on Facebook, there’s steps any normal politically minded person can take to try and erase this type of non-criticism and ultra personal criticism that has risen from the kind-of sarcastic and vulgar depths of 4chan to overtake our modern political landscape. Kill somebody with kindness. If somebody tells you that your political beliefs make you stupid as a person, remind somebody that you and them can benefit from intelligence and doing research. Encourage somebody with a dissenting viewpoint to read up on your perspective. Admittedly, I've failed all of these steps before - even recently. It's incredibly easy to fall into the release of pure hatred that the anonymity of the internet allows. I do it all the time, but it's important that you and I both learn to stop letting the internet propagate our need to hate. It's time we both grow up.

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ON SHOCK VALUE

My english teacher said something towards the beginning of this school year that really stuck with me when analyzing the world afterwards. In studying works of literature that were dating back hundreds upon hundreds of years, we were able to recognize sensationalized stories of adultery and crude fart jokes that retain just as much of their natural appeal to this day. Simply put, he said, “society changes, people don’t really change all that much.” This sentiment has remained in my brain throughout trying to mature my interest in social and political issues, as well. The dirty tricks and seemingly no-filter mindset of the Trump administration could easily just as well describe the Nixon administration. The “libtards” and “alt-right” could easily assign their same set of core values to near-identical groups decades ago.

Sticking with that same idea, let’s shift more towards a cultural climate. The internet and social media have obviously become increasingly huge influencers on the hearts and minds of people all over the world. They’ve largely overtaken TV as the main method of news and luxury content - assuredly for the youngest generation, at least. With this, there’s been a kind of socially conservative pushback (which are numerous throughout history, by the way).

So-called “SJW’s” (standing for Social Justice Warrior) and “soyboys” (a made-up word perpetuating a rather bizarre pseudoscientific myth propagated by neo-con outlets that states that soy is turning men feminine) have been endlessly chastised for being too sensitive to sensitive topics. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the loud, liberal majority that I sometimes find myself falling into. These people damn the “alt-right Nazis” with every chance they get, and while it’s easy to find myself aligning my views with these guys and shouting alongside them, it’s also very easy to discredit these people because of their sheer inability to take criticism of their political beliefs. That applies to both sides, actually. As with most of history, we currently are dealing with two categories of kind-of-related beliefs that people are now arguing about tooth-and-nail and proclaiming themselves morally superior to every other person on the other side.

Enter the average online gamer. This - this wretched personification of scum and villainy - is perhaps the shock jockey of 2018. Perhaps, even, this human-shaped cuss word-spewing, maternal insult-loving thing holds the key for peace amongst different values. I’m fairly certain Milo Yiannopoulos touched on this in his book, however I didn’t read it - although it did inspire me to keep working on this. I was going to read it, but then I scrolled through some of the more choice quotes and editor’s notes in the work and decided that if he can write a successful book, I can win a fucking Pulitzer Prize.

I started playing online video games on a console when I was far too young. Online gaming is pretty much the ultimate one-stop shop for all your needed racial slurs and homophobic insults. If someone kills you in Call of Duty and you’re thirteen years of age, you’re going to call them an offensive slur. It’s just what is going to happen. Not because you hate gay or black people - at least not because the average online gamer hates gay or black people (they barely know what qualifies somebody as homosexual) - but because it’s simply ingrained in the culture of online gaming. There is no filter. There is absolutely nothing to stop you (in this scenario, an underage gamer who enjoys first person shooters) from calling the person who just killed you a flaming homo.

Keep in mind that I am in no way condoning this kind of hyper-facetious, objectively terrible mindset. I’m simply trying to explain why I believe this culture has done a Normandy-style total invasion of our once (at least semi-) pleasant social discussion. As with any advancement in society - and as with generational theory as a whole - what was once taboo is now welcomed by nearly all young people. There’s an always present desire in humans to do and to take pleasure in what our elders have deemed inappropriate. What’s more is that these things become so commonplace in youth culture that we stop even really seeing the taboo in them. Words and phrases that somebody over the age of thirty might deem the pinnacle of vulgarity will come out of a twelve year old’s mouth fast and frequently.

South Park does an absolutely phenomenal job in describing this phenomena using the word “faggot”. See, “faggot” has just about nearly lost all of its weight to children - especially, ESPECIALLY children who are exposed to the horrors of online video gaming and video content from a young age. The word has undergone a genuine shift in meaning to an entire subset of people. Again, this isn’t to condone the use of that word in a different context - it’s a genuine slur that has a history of bigotry and pain behind it. The LGBTQ community faces perhaps one of the roughest forms of disenfranchisement and largest civil rights battles to be undertaken in the history of the country. Keep in mind that I - a cisgender straight white man - am in no means attempting to preach to that community that this should be tolerated in the slightest. However, one can just as easily argue that the only way that a word loses that kind of impact is introduction into a language with a different meaning.

Children don’t say “faggot” when gaming because they think the person who just virtually killed them is a homosexual. Their goal in saying this is not to degrade a people who are faced with a legitimate discrimination from birth. Their goal is to release all of the pent-up, aggressive, absolutely toxic emotions that gaming allows them to release. Does that make the use of the word acceptable in a casual context? Absolutely not. Is this a healthy way to release those emotions? Absolutely not. Yet I’d still be willing to play devil’s advocate and say that it’s relatively healthier than several other ways a child could go about releasing that anger. I’d be far more quick to condemn people genuinely going out of their way on the internet to find people to put down on specific hate-themed subreddits or forum threads. I’d be far more quick to condemn people who go to like-minded scum holes to release their own closeted feelings of sexual confusion and inferiority by putting themselves on a pedestal and putting the LGBTQ community down. I’d be much more willing to forgive a child who lets a quick slur go when they’re on the other end of a virtual headshot. I say this because I’ve both been that child and been constantly around that child. That child doesn’t have large feelings of inferiority masking as vicious hate - at least not usually. That child simply was given a microphone, a childlike temper, and unadulterated virtual freedom. Chances are, they’ll grow up to be a completely tolerable and normal person. They’re simply bathing in this generation’s definition of “shock value.”

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ON FAKE NEWS

Earlier this year, I was tasked with writing another staff editorial for my high school newspaper. The goal of the editorial is to pose a problem on any scale and pose potential solutions to that problem. After news had just came out that Donald Trump had given an order to fire Robert Mueller, (the man in charge of investigating his campaign’s ties to Russian intelligence) I knew clear as day what I wanted to write about. He had come out publicly that very same day and denounced that report using one of him and his handlers’ favorite phrases: “fake news.”

Thankfully, “fake news” doesn’t have the staying power that the Trump administration thought it might. I thought it might indeed have that power, as I heard nearly everyone I knew personally using the phrase to jokingly deny some kind of negative report about them or something they liked. I was at least thankful that everyone around me could see what I saw in Trump’s liberal use of the phrase. They saw it for what it was - an active deflection and denial of any sort of negative report on yourself or something you support. Yet, Trump’s use of the phrase has incredibly negative undertones (if you can even call any sort of ideological position that Trump holds subtextual). Trump was using the phrase to refer to any and all news outlets, including and especially some of the most popular journalistic outfits in the entire United States.

Trump has taken on a creepily autocratic tone with the media. Perhaps it’s all the time him and his handlers have spent collectively slobbing on the knob of the oligarchy that is Russia. Putin and his propaganda division have direct arms into state media, and when I saw that Trump was introducing what he called “real news” on Facebook of all places, my heart skipped a beat. I had sudden premonitions of his administration dismantling any and all journalism that dared question the Donald. It was absolutely - and still is - baffling to me that any red-blooded American who is as nationalistic as they are would sit and applaud a man hellbent on destroying the free press.

Trump drones will tell anyone who seriously questions these notions to “take a joke.” There’s a grain of truth to that sentiment; Donald Trump is incredibly theatrical, even and especially in the seat of POTUS. Many Americans who support him might be completely complacent in calling this kind of rhetoric a “criticism” of the news media. Also, let’s be fair, there are real, recent, documented examples of mainstream liberal-leaning news networks bending stories and soundbytes in order to convey a story how they want to. However, maybe we should leave the criticism of media spins to the consumers of that news - not the one the freaking news is being written about.

This is perhaps the one position that Donald Trump holds that I find completely and totally unnatural. Why would Donald Trump care about what the media thinks of him? Donald Trump loves the media! He’d hand out tips and celebrity stories to gossip rags for the lowly price of simply calling him a “billionaire” somewhere in that same column. He was on a mother fucking god-damned reality TV show. Why in his right mind would this man suddenly hate the media if not for the fact that he was desperately trying to get them to stop pursuing something he didn’t want them to?

Let’s analyze your argument, angered neo-conservative. “But they’re publishing all of this fake news about him! No duh he hates the news media, all they do is publish lies about him!” Do you know this to be true for sure? Wouldn’t you think that if some journalistic output was trying to write hit pieces about Trump that they would:

Be of a smaller scale? Donald Trump is opposed to the entire idea of news media. Do you know who hates news media as a whole? White-collar criminals and people who would probably procreate with their piles of money if given the opportunity.

Come to different conclusions than other news media networks? Nearly every single news outlet - from competing networks, mind you - come to the same conclusion on just about everything regarding a scandal and Donald Trump.

I want you to open your YouTube app and just search “Donald Trump interview” along with any year prior to 2012. Seriously ask yourself if that seems like the man who is unhappy when the camera is on him. He is a complete and total cartoon character. He has always loved every single drop of attention and gratitude he could receive, and even during the campaign and during his tenure as POTUS so far, the news media has resulted in him being able to get his grammatically butchered message across. Donald Trump doesn’t hate the news media - he probably doesn’t even believe that they’re publishing falsehoods. Whoever manages his public relations simply believes that one of the best strategies they can maintain to null the negative effects of scandalous new stories is to discredit them in the eyes of the public entirely. If they can get you to believe that every negative thing ever published about Donald Trump is a lie, you’ll believe anything that comes out of their mouths.

Yet, perhaps I’m simply trying to appeal to a brick wall. Many people (if they are actually people) I’ve seen defending Donald Trump online simply do it just to try and make the other side as angry as possible. I’ve used this analogy previously, but it applies here just as well - if not better. The two party system has largely become much like a sporting event. It’s stopped becoming about what people can do to genuinely research the people that will end up serving their country. It’s simply become about aligning with one side and taking deep pleasure in slamming the other side with all of your mental capability. In blessing his fan base with the phrase “fake news”, he gave them an ultimate (no pun intended) trump card to any and all dissenters that try and get them to read negative stories about their god-emperor.

(I’m not using that last term to make fun of his fans, by the way. They legitimately refer to him as this, hopelessly guzzling any sort of perceived leadership skill from the pale facade that is the mental capacity of Donald Trump.)

In that editorial I wrote for my school paper, I had come to much the same conclusion I do today. Wiping away this despicable notion that all major news sources are telling lies may be somewhat impossible. All you and I can try to do is convince the Trump train-ers of the world that we aren’t violently opposed to this man’s regime because he’s a Republican and you’re a Democrat. Hell, I’m registering myself to vote (which you should too!) as an independent because I’m frankly tired of the complacent corruption and lobbying on both sides of the aisle. I’m violently opposed to this man’s regime because it seems to be built off the goal to try and keep the American people as stupid and violent as possible. “Fake news” will never be anything more to me than a war cry for arrogance and willful blindness.

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ON THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

God, politics bore me. Well, not actually, but I’m beginning to think they might be boring you, humble reader. Politics and social issues have taken up so much of my brain power in the last year of my life. In maturation, I’ve tried to actively monitor the man I’m becoming. I’ve obviously become far more interested in the state of my own nation’s government. I’ve become concerned with the state of civil rights in my own country. Yet, music is perhaps the one place I’ve always had to escape to that could take my mind off the sometimes fruitless anger of world or personal events. I’ve watched my own musical taste grow, trying my damndest to expose myself to any and all types of music ever since I had access to a computer. I didn’t want to become the kid that got pigeonholed into liking emo and metal, even though I enjoyed them very much. I didn’t want other kids to know I was listening to what I would call “guilty pleasures” then: bubblegum pop and quote-unquote “girly” music. Discovering a new album that bent my expectations of what music could even be is one of my favorite feelings I’ve ever experienced in my eighteen short years of life.

However, that feeling wasn’t immediate with They Might Be Giants. I was exposed to their particularly unique brand of rock music at a very young age - perhaps too young to actively pursue music that wasn’t introduced to me by my brother or a friend. I had heard the song “Experimental Film” in a cartoon short for one of my favorite web series growing up: Homestar Runner. Much in the way that Homestar got me through much of my turmoil as a child by taking my mind to another planet of humor, They Might Be Giants have gotten me through my senior year of high school by showing me that even in the most desolate and inescapable of situations that there will always be joy. There will always be something sunny and bubbly to look to cheer me up, even if the lyrics of that sunny, bubbly thing affirm all of my now adult fears. They Might Be Giants feel primordial.

I wanted to take this essay to break from the bleak social commentary tone of the rest of the book and focus on my favorite band, but how fitting that my favorite band has shaped this analytical outlook on the world that has permeated through the rest of my recent existence. Throughout their art are the main themes that have been bouncing around in my skull for months on end - the futile nature of the deskjob, love and loss, and satirical takes on culture are just a few of the themes I’ve managed to pick from their mouths. All of these themes are contrasted with perhaps the most unique and interesting sonic choices I’ve heard from any band that has received the umbrella label of “alternative rock”.

Their music inspires me as a musician first and foremost. Every song that comes from their pens seems to be just an instantaneous, incredibly well constructed bit of pop melody. Top that with their unmistakably lovely singing voices, proficiency, and devastatingly handsome good looks, and you've got a band that I just about immediately fell in love with as soon as I gave one of their records my full attention.

There’s something about TMBG that just completely encapsulates me (and many other fans discovering their music every day). Where other musical acts form and die with one particular sound or image in their head, They Might Be Giants simply seem like the band that’s always been content being themselves and never trying to appeal to any target audience. TMBG have never had any interest on jumping on passing trends or trying to appeal to critics of any era or genre. There’s something genuinely mystifying, magical, and eventually completely engrossing about their unwillingness to be anybody else but themselves. That kind of artistic stability is so rare in any medium, and it leads to fans like me and others knowing that regardless of what kind of absolute horrors take place during maturity that Flansburgh and Linnell will always remain Flansburgh and Linnell.

Their music can take me from a thrashing rage to an eager grin and laughter. Their music can shift what you feel are the tropes of popular music all while never straying too much from remaining an incredibly solid pop band at their core. Their sense of observation on the world - something you can pick up on by even hearing them give one interview - is absolutely unmatched. It inspires me to be not only rational and thoughtful, but creative and emotional as well. Their music is irreplaceable both in the minds of thousands of fans as well as in the entire lexicon of popular music.

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ON THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

I wonder what was going through that kid’s mind when he was sitting in a Walmart McDonald’s, eating fast food right after mercilessly and inhumanely gunning down his peers and administrative staff with an AR-15. When I had read that this is what the Parkland, Florida shooter did after escaping from his own chaos in the midst of his classmates, that’s immediately where my mind jumped. How do you sit and ingest a Happy Meal amongst completely innocent citizens near the same area in which you had just murdered so many others? What goes through a person’s mind in a scenario like that?

Unlike others, I don’t want to assume any one thing had an incredibly large impact on his decision to commit the crime that he did. Anything can spark that. As a teenage schizoid myself, I can tell you that anything and everything can spark a young mind’s insecurities to the point where they feel as if simply living is a weight on the planet unworthy of being there. I’m not going to refer to him by his name, as that simply gives him unwarranted attention in death. I think it’s that attention that these people seek to ultimately gain before death. These people feel so undignified with the premise of even being alive amongst their age group that they think that committing an act like this is the only way they’ll be able to receive any kind of recognition before they vanish off the face of the Earth. I don’t want to tell you I understand the mind of a school shooter because I do not, and nobody else on the planet does either besides themselves.

I want you as a reader to know that I don’t view an event like this politically - not right away. Nobody views at event like this from a political standpoint immediately. There’s no event quite like an unending wave of sympathy and support that unanimously washes over the United States after a tragedy like this. For as much as we bicker and fight, we’re usually pretty good at throwing our emotional support behind those that truly need it.

Yet, events like this usually end up on the tongues of pundits and angry internet commenters almost immediately - and that discussion infects its way onto the tongues of the average American citizen within days, if not hours. In my humble opinion, it’s simply impossible to avoid this conclusion and avoid participating in discussions of this magnitude. For anyone that closely follows and deeply cares about social and political issues, the politics and the person are inseparable. For those who truly see government as a beacon of opportunity for those with real power to make an impact for the good of the public, politics enter the discussion rightly and swiftly.

I’m not going to surprise anybody who knows in me in real life (or anybody who’s read up to this point in the book) by saying that I’m an advocate for much stronger gun control legislation. However, I grew up with a moderately conservative father who always had a natural affection for hunting and had a genuine appreciation for guns, so I like to think I was exposed to both viewpoints very early in my life. I try to understand the opposition that someone on the other side of this argument typically holds.

There’s something quite intoxicating about a gun. It’s an atypical American symbol of rebellion and freedom. The first image that probably enters your mind when you think of the American Revolution are men in white wigs all holding American-made rifles, fighting violently against the tyrannical force of the British empire. That image is absolutely intoxicating to an entire, large group of American citizens who have come to internalize that nationalistic, patriotic way of thinking.

That image isn’t an inherently bad thing, in my opinion. However, you can not sit there and tell me that those men’s adherence and need for firearms while fighting for the sovereignty of a new nation over two hundred years ago plays into your desire to own an assault rifle.

Not only were those men technological light years away from the current deathly advanced state of warfare, but most of the continent which those men stood on was yet to even be fully discovered by humankind. This is not a picture of modern day America, or a picture resembling the modern day world in any singular kind. We are not in immediate danger by simply being Americans anymore - except from the people like the Parkland shooter, who are legally allowed to purchase a machine designed and manufactured to kill other humans.

There’s a violent reaction that conservatives and libertarians will give you if you suggest the idea of imposing some kind of federal legislature to make the purchasing and possession of machines like this implicitly harder to maintain. They’ll act as if you’re tearing apart a vital limb of democracy itself and usually spit some sort of rhetoric about a revolution (either incoming or previous) and how we won’t be able to protect ourselves if the government turns on us. Nevermind the fact that every developed nation in the world now possesses the technology to drop ballistic missiles wherever they want with some coordinates on the push of a button.

Again, I do see the merit of small firearms in areas where it’s crucial to be able to protect yourself. There are parts of America where I wouldn’t advise not carrying some kind of defense mechanism on yourself. There are parts of any country where this is the case. I’ve been planning to move to Philadelphia, so I’m probably going to invest in some kind of small firearm when I’m entering into central parts of the city for work or school. However, what I don’t picture myself doing is carrying around a backpack with an AR-15 in it - and if I’m not going to need one as a 5’7” kid in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, you’re not going to need one to keep up with the imaginary threat of the government that Alex Jones and yourself have implanted in your own brain.

The fact of the matter is that these machines aren’t meant for normal, civilian use. They’re designed for situations in which people in combat need to be able to control as many shots as they can as fast as they can. They’re designed for the military. We’ve already got such a heavy militarization of our police departments and our border patrol, we don’t really need easier paths to militarization of our civilians as well. Unfortunately, that seems to be the direction in which several conservative lawmakers seem to strongly trend towards. Legislators like this - who are currently in control of America’s legislative process as of February, 2018 - are immediate to offer thanks and prayers at a time of a mass shooting (see, I was gonna get to it eventually).

Thanks and prayers aren’t wrong - they’re altruistic by nature. They’re not quite as altruistic when you’re bragging about how altruistic you’re being on social media, but I digress. It’s so incredibly difficult to process and swallow thanks and prayers from Republican lawmakers who are so quick to blame anything and everything for mass shootings in America - except the guns. Republican government officials are so much quicker to blame violent video games and movies for mass shootings than the readily available assault rifles. Conservatives wonder why liberal Americans get so mad during discussions on gun control - and as such fail to analyze the most basic principles of the gun control argument taking place in the United States. One side is flinging pointed fingers at everything and anything they can that they believe poisoned the minds of people like the Parkland shooter, or the Las Vegas shooter, or the Sandy Hook shooter, or the Columbine shooters, etc. One side is screaming (seemingly to a brick wall) that we should probably take the assault rifles out of their hands and their communities before we start having the discussion about what impacted their mental health so heavily.

Every thought and every prayer from some ancient lawmaker seems even more hollow when you look at it from a lobbying perspective. Enter one of the main opponents behind my political worldview and the course of the book thus far - lobbying. The New York times imposed tweets from government officials after the Las Vegas shooting and contrasted them with how much money they received from the NRA during their careers. Senior totally-disappointed-in-Trump-but-still-gonna-cash-this-NRA-money honcho John McCain tops the list, with an emotional tweet placed under his face and nameplate. “Cindy & I are praying for the victims of the terrible #LasVegasShooting & their families.”

Placed underneath, in tall, menacing letters, reads $7,740,521. That’s how much a superstar Republican like John McCain receives from an organization designed to maintain the producing and distribution of machines that are designed to kill other people. When there’s this large of a conflict-of-interest going on with what a numerous amount of Americans agree is a threat to public health and safety, there’s a clear problem in the way the government is being allowed to do business.

I believe that gun control is the answer to solving this ongoing, needless American crisis - if not for any reason than because guns have so effortlessly permeated themselves into American culture, and I don’t see mass shootings (or the violent liberal reaction to them) slowing down at any point soon unless that reverses course. The implication that guns are not the main perpetrator in the epidemic of mass shootings is ridiculous on a purely logical level. The implication that there’s some sort of underlying societal reason that people are having the desire to go and shoot countless numbers of their peers may be well-intentioned, but it’s like trying to figure out why a serial killer whom you know the name and face of is murdering everybody in town with grenades he’s buying from the general store. Hey, here’s an idea, how about we stop selling grenades? That might solve some of our problems.

(As a late addendum to this essay, I want to say that I don’t discount the authenticity behind some legitimate claims of arming yourself against governments. While I do believe it’s pretty rich for this to be coming from the mouth of straight, white Christians, I will absolutely say I believe that anybody of Hispanic descent living below the Mason-Dixon Line should probably be strapped at just about all times right now.)

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ON ROGER STONE, DISINFORMATION, AND DOING YOUR RESEARCH

If you’ve been keeping up, you may have picked up on themes much like this one headed above throughout the essays thus far. However, I feel they deserve their own passage and more so, because these three things working in an absolutely abhorrent, glorious, tremendously awful combination gifted Donald Trump the presidency on a silver platter. That means that they may just go down as three of the most important concepts in American history when the current tidal wave of political discourse subsides.

These three may seem randomly assembled at first, but anyone who knows of the first should probably be able to pick up on why the other two are there as well. Roger Stone is a political consultant for the Republican Party - and god damn does he know how to win an election. He’s spent nearly his entire lengthy political career advising numerous Republican presidential candidates, while also forging a brazen path of awful lobbying practices with his buddy, business partner, and future Trump campaign chairman (and indictee!) Paul Manafort. While I don’t doubt the mega storm of terrible proportions that led to all of us having received the Donald, Trump’s image and mantra can be largely attributed to Stone’s trademark brand of capitalization on fear and tasteless xenophobia.

Stone is constantly thrashed in liberal, mainstream media for being - well, exactly what he is. Stone never denies his image as a dirty trickster, in fact, he has come to completely envelop himself in the role. He takes on an almost Cruela de Vil level of incredibly cartoonish evil, flaunting himself to television cameras and documentarians as the upmost example of violent idealism in the Republican Party. He should, he’s absolutely earned it.

In a particularly peculiar way, I admire Roger Stone to no end. Sure, every single moral fiber in my body actively spits on the electrical impulses of his face that get sent through my brain when I think of his name. Yet, he’s so profoundly, ridiculously effective at what he does. He exemplifies public opinion - albeit the egregiously hateful public opinions. He sees the value in catering to not only the platforms that are accepted by the masses, but platforms endorsed by countless niche groups that end up essential in manipulating election results to desired effect. He sees the tremendous value in getting down to the ideological level of a voter. Donald Trump never came off as anything more than a brass tacks, politically incorrect, blue collar, beer gunning American citizen in debates. While that’s traditionally poison in the snooty world of politics, Stone saw the opportunity to exploit a particularly ravenous time in American politics to throw the ultimate curveball into the mold of a boisterous candidate. Donald Trump was - and still is - an absolute caricature of your average Republican pundit, making him absolutely irresistible to any self-identified Republican in America desperate to stick it to their intelligent (read: obnoxious) peers.

What makes Stone so effective - in my opinion - is his ability to continuously rev the engine of his voter base throughout elections. He’s become synonymous with “dirty tricks”, usually describing any unconventional and immoral ways to manipulate a large group of people into voting the way you would prefer them to. One of the most effective ways he’s done this is through continuous disinformation, noticeable on social media to this day. Facebook in particular has become an absolute Stone voter heaven, manipulating its news feed into an unabashed Petri dish of paranoid conspiracies, fear-mongering, liberal bashing, and general political tongue lashing. It is, however, possible to see examples of biased political posts on nearly every single current large social media platform. Before long in the 2016 presidential campaign, you had countless American people believing absolute falsehoods about Hillary Clinton’s physical health and satanic connections - along with classic, old, perpetually stupid stories about Obama, such as him being a Kenyan Muslim. Before long after that, you had Kellyanne Conway on television defending that disinformation by coining Orwellian phrases like “alternative facts”.

Tying this disinformation to Stone or any one person directly would be all but impossible. At the beginning of the documentary “Get Me Roger Stone”, a must-watch Netflix film documenting the tactics and effectiveness in Stone’s political operation throughout his career, he discusses the value of disinformation. He then coyly states that after he had initially discovered the value of disinformation as an elementary school student, he “of course has not practiced it a day since then.” He says this with all the charm and conviction of a poisonous snake straight out of some folklore. Tying the most recent wave of political disinformation to Stone directly would be incredibly difficult and pointless, but it’s got an inherent smell of Stone. It’s always lurking near every corner of every social media platform, never letting you go a single day without the current modus operandi of the Republican Party drilled into your brain.

This recent monumental wave of disinformation plus the concept of disinformation in the way that Roger Stone would use it deserved its own essay and more. You could easily fill a book with an analysis of posts and particularly awful examples of trying to actively divide citizens - and perhaps I’ll do that someday. In doing these essays, I wanted to focus on what I feel were some of the most important events that have occurred over the last few years of my life. Being a teenager who’s used the internet as long as he’s had two digits in his age column, I can say with absolute certainty that I truly feel the exploitation of social media by nefarious foreign actors will be remembered as one of the most important events of my lifetime. In having incredibly lax standards for what is considered upstanding journalistic content, Facebook and others have indirectly tricked thousands of American voters into believing things about their potential world leaders that are just untrue. The true “fake news” epidemic is one that has already been successful in carrying out its intended purpose - tricking the American people into voting for Donald Trump through calculated misinformation on other candidates.

What intrigues me most about this new brand of disinformation is that Republicans have essentially turned it into a political platform. The entire Trump administration is essentially banking on the fact that their voter base will never seek or genuinely believe any information that falls outside of their socioeconomic views. They’re wagering a complete and total citizen uprising on the notion that social media will continue to divide the masses even further apart from each other politically. They’re wagering that not only will social media make us politically lazier, it'll amount to us never doing much more than taking virtual action against nationwide injustice. They’re wagering that social media will continue to radicalize us more towards our own preconceived biases without taking other people’s points of view to heart. From my opinion, the scariest part of all of that is the fact that they seem to be a hundred percent correct so far.

Uprooting the way in which most every single American with a device connected to the internet receives their news media is far from an easy job. It becomes even harder when you have countless paid trolls supporting Russia’s internet Research Agency (along with each American party, obviously) who are disguising as American citizens to try and radicalize the masses even further. If you’re going to read that last sentence and try and argue that the existence of paid Russian trolls is just a witch hunt, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictments of thirteen Russian individuals for being related to the IRA says otherwise.

Yet, it may be possible to take smaller steps to try and educate the masses to do their research. This is where I see a man like Roger Stone and admire him for his ability to input information almost directly into the public consciousness, simply by knowing the right people and soundbytes to use as his megaphones. If he felt like using his tremendous human analyzation for good instead of evil, he’d be perhaps the most celebrated political consultant of all time - instead of just one of the richest. There could be Stone-like steps the Democratic Party needs to take in order to make sure that the war on reason isn’t going to be won by the likes of Stone and Alex Jones. For one - and this, really, is unrelated to the topic at hand - but get a more exciting presidential candidate, please. Sure, Obama and Hillary were both boundary-pushing simply because of their existence in modern politics, but Obama had a far more interesting and captivating campaign platform. I’ve already touched upon this, but one of the primary reasons Clinton lost the election is because she was anti-Stonian in one major way - she was portrayed incredibly boringly. Contrasted with the absolute insanity on the other side of the aisle, Clinton simply seemed like a beige-colored talking head. Sure, Trump seemed like a loud, idiotic talking head, but he wasn’t boring.

The Democratic Party needs to take one primary tip from Stone if they take any - always attack, never defend. The Democratic Party needs a better propaganda department. It’s become essential in marketing your message effectively, and whatever institutions they have trying to drill their message into the heads of voters are coming off vague, uptight, and droning. They need to embrace altering viewpoints. They need to be able to pitch research and factual verification in a sexy way - which sounds about as easy as signing a nun up for an escort service. Most importantly, they need to fight disinformation with loud, catchy, actual information. Modernize the message like Stone while taking the high road at the same time. Get younger, more volatile political circles to focus on something that would be irresistible to political minds twenty and younger. Get some paid employee to sit on Twitter all day, botting up responses linking to actual journalism. Learn what will truly get the attention of young voters - brash honesty and admittance of the system’s flaws. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders appeal to so many young people because they got up in front of a podium that’s traditionally used to gloat about how amazing the federal government is doing and said “Hey, this system is incredibly broken and unfair to the ever-weakening middle class.” That kind of evaluation is commonplace to adults, young and old, across the country.

It’s going to have to take a change in focus on a scale previously unmatched in modern political history, but I believe there’s both tips you can take from somebody like Roger Stone and common sense changes you can make to the Democratic Party to make it far more appealing to a voter of my age range. Stop believing that every young person will grow up having ultimate faith in the federal government and give them a legitimate reason to have that faith again.

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ON RADIOHEAD, ISOLATION, AND BEING EIGHTEEN

There’s a really simple premise to this essay in my own mind. I love Radiohead. They’re totally, without hyperbole, the greatest band of all time ever to exist - in the history of ever. Alright, that’s not wholly the reason, scientifically just as it may be. As with They Might Be Giants, Radiohead have been instrumental to my musical tastes, my general education, and most importantly my mental well being over the course of my time at high school. They represent an integral part of my emotional aura. Multiple works of theirs have been constantly ringing in my ears over and over again when I’ve felt most at odds with the idea of even still being alive.

The first time I heard OK Computer, I had a religious experience. I know, I know, that’s an overused analogy when referring to one’s favorite band - but I really identified with the sentiment the first time I heard the ending of Exit Music. Throughout my schooling going back to Kindergarten, chronic health conditions have impacted my ability to remain in school for the entirety of a five day week. Two particular times they were at their worst were in seventh grade, where my immunodeficiency was officially diagnosed, and during the second semester of my sophomore year of high school. On the first occasion, I spent months on end sitting in a basement browsing the internet on a computer in complete and total isolation from anyone near my age group. Just being near a computer for as long as I had been up to that point, I learned the ins and out of being a regular internet user at a fairly young age. Pretty soon after that, I had developed an entirely new virtual sense of self. It should say something that I still consider the second period of social isolation more important in my life, because that’s the first time I ever heard O.K. god damned Computer.

See, being in those positions relatively early in my life combined with a sometimes strenuous home life - due to the illnesses and other matters, combined to create a tenuous mental state in me from an early point. I quickly noticed myself becoming much more cold and calculated in the way I saw human emotions transitioning from middle to high school. I’ve been an objectively terrible person to people I truly love at certain points in my life. Yet, somehow only in my senior year of high school, I’ve learned to truly be able to take my own mental state seriously, grow from my mistakes, be a genuinely kinder person to those around me, and treat myself with respect first. I attribute all of that to me hearing O.K. Computer for the first time during my sophomore year.

At this certain point in my life, my health conditions had already had such an impact on my schooling that I took cyber classes for a half of one school year. As a child who’s gone through traditional public school his entire life - with the exception of the seventh grade period - the transition was viciously painful. What started as enjoyment over the freedom of my schedule led to nothing short of maddening cabin fever upon the realization that I would be essentially stranded to stare at my dining room wall for the length of a day. I would go multiple days with minimal amounts of sunlight. I truly felt - perhaps consciously thinking about it for the first time in my life - that my condition was taking a vice grip on my entire existence. I can’t even remember how O.K. Computer made its way onto my queue, but it did. When I listened to it for the first time, I was blown away. When I listened to it with my full attention, I transcended out of my body.

It felt as if God was speaking to me. Yes - I’m completely aware - that’s egregiously corny. Perhaps you have to put on the shoes of an angst-ridden teenager finally feeling as if he’s truly coming to the age where he can see the world for the first time. Hearing this kind of record at this point in my life felt as if all of my inhibitions and greatest fears were acknowledged, validated, and righteously slain before my very ears. Every otherworldly piece of ambience, every ding of a microwave, every lyric seemingly letting internal cries of feeling like a free spirit trapped in the body of a robot finally be heard. Radiohead truly meant more than just the sum of its sonic parts to a teenager finding himself.

As with several other things in my life - usually other music - there’s an immediate state of mind I can be teleported to when I hear Jonny Greenwood’s guitar start to talk at the beginning of Airbag. I’m transferred to a wooden dining room chair, letting my eyes shut with focus and excitement. I would spastically dance around the entire first floor of my house to the first two tracks during the period of the day when I knew nobody would be able to see me. I wasn’t free, but in that moment my spirit felt as if it was. There was something comforting that came about after I knew that that record would be special to me for the rest of my life. It was as if it was a window to another part of my life, one where I would be able to listen to that wax again and reflect on that very time in my life that I spent cooped up as a paranoid android.

More so than simply being teleported to a state of isolation and desire to be free, O.K. Computer represents perhaps a summation of all my fears up to this point in my life. At the time, I directly related to lyrics that were crying of social isolation and disconnect with the modern world. Soon after, I was living out some of those fears during a particularly tumultuous short-lived relationship. This relationship didn't simply turn toxic, it was practically built upon the very idea of toxicity itself. I dealt out my share of paranoid delusions, and when it came to unhealthy coping mechanisms, we made each other worse. The relationship was bound to fail. During that period, I had the band’s more abstract works on repeat near endlessly. I had gone from observing that hauntingly sinking feeling of isolationism to actively living it; feeling as if my very existence was a lapse in reason on the universe’s part. I was actively forgetting weeks of my life - actively praying to random deities for relief from my woes all while never making any actual effort to improve my outlook. Largely, I view the last few years of my life as particularly shameful in some aspects. Yet, I simultaneously view them as definitively the most important of my entire life so far.

By the time that relationship ended, I was playing Radiohead’s newest record, A Moon Shaped Pool, near-constantly. Without realizing it, I had logically progressed alongside my discovery of the band’s music, culminating in one of the most emotionally manic yet most healing times in my life. I vividly remember stumbling through the streets of my small town as a pitiful mess the day my cousin Mitchell died. On top of my brief, tiring relationship still tasting sour, I was informed that my cousin died of a fatal car accident mere days afterwards. I meandered through the town a slobbering mess, letting the band soundtrack my stumbling. I tortured myself with mental images of petty relationship realizations, paired with mental images of real honest-to-god examples of manipulation I hadn't previously considered. On top of all of this, my mind was constantly drifting to years prior, envisioning a simpler time in my life. My cousin Mitchell would always make himself the butt of the joke to get a laugh out of the rest of the Sauter boys. I couldn't stop think about the time Mitchell ran around the basement of my Grandmother's old house, pouring pepper onto his tongue as she chased him around. It constantly was flinging up images of the Nintendo GameCube and frolicking in the radiance of being a child. I’ll put something at the end of this for all the people I dedicate this to, but know that this passage is for you, Mitchell. If anybody asks me why I'm shedding tears whenever I happen to play a match of Super Smash Bros. Melee on Mitch’s (née Hyrule) castle, I’ll always be happy to let them know who really ran that stage.

As the song “True Love Waits” played, I sat on the ground of the street that intersected mine at the end of my route. As Yorke sang of the futility of true love, I sat with my face in my hands and bawled at what it felt my young life had amounted to up to that point - illness, manipulation, and sadness. Perhaps this is simply what all of the teenage angst and emotional turmoil was amounting to, but it was simply an elephant stomping on my chest at that current moment.

I “solved” this problem in the way I’ve tended to “solve” all of my internal struggles to this point in my life - like a complete and total schizoid. I contemplated the total weight of all my actions up to that point in my life and how they’d fed me into the utter turmoil which I had been in the midst of. I referred to that always comforting conscience that had kept me company in even the darkest, most solitary moments of my life. It (combined with a great therapist) led me to take the first true steps towards self-respect. I started to not become so fixated on what others had thought about my recovery process. Soon after that I was working on not being so fixated on what others thought in general. Before long I was making active steps towards self-confidence and normal social interaction that I had never even dreamed I would be mentally capable of. Basic things that I had never even previously registered were becoming clear as day to me - things as simple as dressing nicer to feel nicer or taking comfort in my own emotional beliefs.

Part of the reason why I believe I’ve had such a desire to retain as much information as I have is the same part of why I believe I’ve been such an abhorrently socially awkward nightmare throughout most of my life. For whatever reason, in nearly every facet of my personal life relating directly to events and emotions I was taking place in, I’ve never been able to feel confident in my own thoughts. I’ve always doubted the intellectual, and especially the emotional ground I stood on at any moment in time throughout my adolescence. Obviously there are some exceptions, and I try to remain outspoken on social issues, music, and other topics that genuinely make my engine purr. Anything involving yours truly directly, however, invokes feelings of hair-pulling anxiety and nervous pacing. For whatever reason, I’ve always felt it biting me from the back of my brain. I think from the time I was small I simply accounted it as being a part of having an operational, analytic brain. My observations on anything else couldn’t possibly be clear if I didn’t acknowledge to myself that I was an imperfect pile of thoughts and feelings. I’m not here to dissect myself, however. That’s what I have a psychiatrist for.

While I may have seemed like I was trying to extract sympathy or present myself as a special case by highlighting my conditions and my affinity for Radiohead, I wasn’t trying to do so. I simply was trying to spill the emotions and mindframe of a child going through the transition to adulthood onto paper through ink. I want this essay - and this collection - to be my first real yawp of passion into the world. I want it to be my first war cry of independence. Every child wants this. Every single kid on the planet goes through what I go through; those children face the same internal struggles and forced maturity that led me to even want to write these very words. Every child in the world wants to be able to grow up, make an impact on the world, and truly be able to be happy with what they’ve done at the end of the day. It encapsulates the heart and soul of a teenager, usually manifesting through what is normally dismissed as angst. In children like me, it highlights feelings of desire to move past the situation which had previously had an emotional and psychological toll on them and truly assert themselves in the real world. In others, it highlights desires to express themselves as artistically as they can, with people like my brother dedicating themselves to their craft solely for the purpose of making one grand artistic statement before they meet their maker. Every child on the face of the planet faces an equally valid reason for their burst of rage, sadness, questioning, maturity, emotional instability, intellectual growth, questions of authority, and desire to move past a certain point in their life. While these situations are by far from exclusive to children in my position, they’re just about ubiquitous with this transition into adulthood. Listen to me, fellow age-group peer reading this passage: your feelings are valid. I love you simply because you exist. Anything that you could criticize yourself for due to an irrational, emotional nature isn't worthy of such. I used to beat myself up over my emotions relating to myself, my family, and my condition. I wish I had something there that I could’ve relied on to tell me that throughout my childhood. Then again, I would criticize myself for then putting too much of my emotional baggage into some innocent person’s life, and the cycle would begin again. If you’ve ever been caught in this cycle, please know that you’re so far from alone; that if you truly knew the amount of kids in your situation your head would spin. You’re sane, you’re loved, you’re splendid.

Something about the number eighteen has just brought about the absolute biggest change in my life thus far. The atypical teenage angst that’s to be expected from somebody my age has manifested into an all-out declaration of independence from my hometown, my medical conditions, my own anxiety, manipulative forces in my life, and guilt for simply feeling what I know I feel in my soul. My life has gained more direction in the last year than in the previous sixteen combined. I truly feel as though, for the first time, I’d be comfortable with sharing the intimate details of my life with somebody or something. Hell, even writing this essay designed for public consumption would’ve invoked shaking fear inside me as of a few years ago. Also, yes, if you’re asking, I believe all of this glorious realization of self-worth and love came when in the transitional moment between the skull-drilling monotony of cyberschool and the first time I ever heard Paranoid Android by Radiohead. Which is why this essay was, is throughout, and always will be scientific, factual proof that Radiohead is the greatest band ever to play instruments and form to record music - ever. Forever and ever, double infinity plus one.

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ON AJIT PAI, NET NEUTRALITY AND THE “FUTILITY” OF MODERN ACTIVISM

As I’ve alluded to multiple times thus far, I was essentially raised by the internet. From the moment I hit the age of reading comprehension, the internet quickly became my primary source of information and entertainment. I’m positive that this is the case for many others as of the current year, and what each person decides to take from those experiences will probably end up shaping the brains and souls of millions upon millions of children in the future. As such, threats to the free and open internet which I’ve been accustomed to have taken up ample space in my head whenever they should arise. I vividly remember Wikipedia and other sites going completely black when the Stop Online Piracy Act (colloquially and infamously known as SOPA) was moving through the motions of legislature and quickly working to become law. I sat in my grandparent’s basement during a period of chronic health impairment in awe that websites that had been the foundation of my childhood taking a large, organized stand against the government. It was inspiring to me to see a vast virtual landscape usually so happy with being angry and divided all uniting to give a giant middle finger to something that threatened their very existence.

People who use the internet as not only a source of entertainment in their already over saturated lives, but a genuine lifeline for world events take attacks on it entirely personally. The internet isn’t cable. The internet isn’t a cellular phone network. The internet is a human utility, crucial to the very practice of democracy in this modern day. When people like Ajit Pai come into power, the citizens of the internet are quick, vicious, ravenous, and absurdly thorough in their hatred. However, Pai was set up to be little more than simply the bearer of all of that hatred. Pai was set to be the harbinger of death for net neutrality. What Pai represents is far more despicable than just his image and attitude lead you to believe. Say it with me: lobbying.

Before we go any further, I want to say that I hate the phrase “net neutrality”. The concept of net neutrality is integral to the freedom of the American people. The actual phrase “net neutrality” is confusing, and doesn’t immediately indicate anything. If the general public knew what net neutrality actually constituted, there would be protests in the streets. Simply put, net neutrality is the (previously) universally recognized agreement that the internet is not a commodity to be hoarded and manipulated by corporations. Companies that give Americans internet, such as Comcast or Verizon, previously were disallowed by law from restricting access to certain websites for the purpose of exclusive business. They were also disallowed from restricting access to any websites at all, along with being “forced” to abide by a set of rules aimed to ensure a fair competition of internet service providers. I put “forced” in quotations because huge, scumbag, conglomerate corporations like the ones previously mentioned are usually the only options available from purchasing access to the internet in one area. You usually get a pick between one company with terrible prices and nonexistent customer service or another company with terrible speeds and nonexistent customer service. Along with this anti-competition, the ISP’s have all united in favor of Ajit Pai and the incumbent FCC.

Let’s take a second to think of the logic behind the new FCC’s positions. The Federal Communications Commission, a bipartisan agency in charge of regulating the internet, is now spitting endless rhetoric about how removing the principles which ensure free and open competition in the payment of broadband itself will somehow create a “freer market”.

(Authors note: HAHAHA OH MY GOD ENRON TRIED TO DO THIS. So much freedom.)

Newsflash, people, when a handful of huge companies are all banding together to try and get a federal agency to cut regulations - they’re creating the opposite of a free market. There’s fewer people allowed to compete with the existing, already borderline monopoly of internet service providers. Pai and his FCC are pissing on everybody’s head and telling them it’s about to rain gold.

Pai is willing to do an Irish jig in the middle of his fucking absurdly sized coffee cup for Verizon Wireless. Pai is willing to literally bake himself into the middle of a Pai for AT&T. Pai would throw himself out of a thirty story building for Comcast. Pai would make an absurdly cringe-tastic internet video trying (and failing) desperately to convince average, everyday consumers that the internet would be just fine if net neutrality were gone. Though, with how disastrously awful and hateable that turned out to be, perhaps he’d just stick to the dancing for money. Pai represents lobbying reaching its grubby, disgusting arms into the 21st century - desperate to do anything and everything it can to disrupt the life of the middle class. He’d go on TV assuring the public that internet service providers toooootally wouldn’t get out of hand with regulating themselves. He has total “faith” that companies like Verizon wouldn’t slow down their network when someone is accessing a competing service. Yeah, I’m sure you do.

It’s so incredibly easy to hate Pai - in fact it’s so ridiculously easy that I’m inclined to believe he was picked for the position specifically because of his ease of ability to be hated. It’s the same strategy that seems to be popping up all over the Republican Party post-Trump (post-Schwarzenegger if we really wanna go there). Pick a candidate for the job whom incites the most hatred from your opposition as you possibly can. Win or lose, the people will simply just be interested in removing that one specific guy - they’ll pay no mind to the underlying root of the problem. With Pai, the internet was unabashedly unanimous in their hatred, destined to post spiteful memes about his horse-toothed grin, coffee cup the same size of his love for ISP money, punchable face, and willful ignorance for what people value about the internet. What people miss is that he simply represents the personification of those traits. Through lobbying, those traits will continue to have staying power in Washington. Regardless of who fills Pai’s seat next, they’ll have to be dealing with multiple gigantic internet service providers breathing down their neck, bribing them to get special treatment.

What could possibly end something as unjust and systematic as that? Activism, that’s entirely what. I’ve touched really briefly before on the idea of activism itself, but I want to reiterate what I know I’ve already said on the subject. People who hold the real power of the world right now want nothing less than organization on the powerless’ part. The internet itself makes this inherently more difficult; where some of us would see the internet as perhaps the easiest way to organize in world history, there’s evidence that it also could be playing into our inability to rise up and claim true power for the people.

Sure, there were successful attempts to organize protesters and activists on the internet before. The Occupy protests made headline news for just reasons, but it lacked focus and drive. The numbers were impressive, but their message was muddy and vague at best. All anybody knew about the movement were the numbers ninety-nine and one. What the internet needs is a movement with a real, physical body count that is effective and relentless at spreading its message. Conservative heads, such as Fox News and the like, criticized the Occupy protest for having no real push and then simply disappearing into obscurity. Every single person who was there had other things to do, they had to move through real futility - the futility of being middle class in America.

I believe it’s precisely the internet that is making young people educated that is one and the same with the internet that is dumbing kids down. Whether this newfound stillness in the morality and ability to take action in young people is a direct result of the relatively new phenomena relating dopamine interference and social media or just a standard byproduct of aging is yet to be determined. Perhaps it won’t ever be determined. From my perspective, however, I see the internet making two distinct impacts that are similar in nature even from differing viewpoints. On one side of the spectrum, I see that the ease of connection that the internet allows is breeding grassroots movements near constantly. You can see evidence of this with all of the large-scale protests that have taken place over the last few years. Protests in the Black Lives Matter campaign were organized, arranged, and unified online. In that regard, the internet has proven to be a fantastic tool of liberty. We’ve also seen the internet be a vital tool in organizing vicious movements on the opposite side of the political spectrum. What immediately comes to mind is the remarkable precision that 4Chan is always known for; constantly messing with Shia LeBeouf and other self-righteous and overtly stupid trends. Say what you will about that rapscallious bunch known as the anonymous internet hacker 4chan, but damn can those dudes assemble.

Yet on the opposite end of that spectrum, I see a large social media landscape that is acting much in the way that television has been traditionally criticized for - mass disinformation and “dumbing down” of those that consume it. Again, Facebook is immediately my primary target of focus here, as it’s been both the largest name in social media throughout my adolescence and simultaneously the biggest offender of fake news invasion and subversion throughout the entire tumultuous Trump era. It’s this side of social media that has me especially worried for what the current administration has in store to suppress activism. While I believe that the hands behind the current talking heads would rather have active disagreement right now than cooperation, I earnestly believe there will come a time where the tune of the youth and the tune of the internet starts to change to a pitch that the heads of state aren’t a fan of. There will come a tipping point in which they will try and largely discount the voice of the youth, which will mean discounting the voice of the internet. This struggle will become the biggest fight of my young adulthood. The seemingly always constant fear of the free internet being taken away from you may tire you out to no end. It may even tire you to the point of wanting to actively discourage activism as a futile means to accomplish nothing. What I want to try and accomplish with this essay is a transition of the word “activism” to refer less to an active event that you have to directly plan and participate for, and more to an ideological state that I believe every American carries within them.

Activism isn’t futile - it’s precisely the feeling that invalidates that very assumption. It’s the inherent desire within most Americans to want to do right by every single other American who lives here. You don’t have to be constantly arranging protests or dedicating all of your free time to social and political movements. Activism can simply be donating to a charitable cause that you’ve researched and support. Activism can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s directly supporting your fellow American brothers and sisters. Sure, marching is primarily what comes to mind when you think of an activist, but truly an activist is simply someone who takes action to a cause greater than themselves.

As of writing this essay, there’s two weeks before a nationwide school walkout to protest the state of gun legislature on the one month anniversary of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. As of yesterday, my high school administration issued emails and voicemails stating that Pennsylvania State Police were investigating claims of a threat specifying the March 14th protest as the time of occurrence for a gun violence threat. As of today, I have little to no specific information on the matter. All information I have relates to some kid I don’t know making a threat aimed directly to another kid (not me) during that time period. Yet, all friends and colleagues have told me that the threat was largely seen as a joke, and had been from the account of somebody pretending to be the person making the threat. After being scared to death that my protest was going to put somebody’s life in danger last night after my brother had texted me worriedly, I realized that it was this mindset particularly that I was trying to get the school to overcome. It was this mindset particularly that I was trying to get the school to realize was scaring the administration into wanting to hold some super-secure press conference in the gym instead of participating in this historic event. As of today, I’m still planning to go ahead with a walkout with or without the administration’s approval.

You might scroll up a paragraph or two and find my categorization of targets of 4chan raids as “self-righteous” a bit hypocritical given the entire nature of this essay. While I don’t disagree, there’s two main counterpoints I have to that statement that sum up my feelings in this essay at large. For one, I’m not particularly crazy about the negative connotation that we’ve decided to ascribe to terms such as “self-righteous” and “pretentious”. I think those connotations in themselves denounce individualism and pride in one’s own actions. No movements on the face of the planet started with people doubting their own potential impact and merit. Relatedly, finally, and secondly, activism is something you’re allowed to feel good about yourself for. Before you shut your eyes asleep at night, you can honestly say that you were acting to try and make a positive impact on the world. If there’s anything on the planet that you’re allowed to feel good about yourself for, it’s that.

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ON NEW MEDIA

What is art? Answer must be in two or more complete sentences:

Ok, granted, that’s a pretty vague question, but it's one that I’m still not entirely sure of the answer to. This book isn’t a traditional form of art, it’s not anything but a wannabe makeshift social commentary/memoir-type-thing; I wouldn’t call that art if somebody on the street asked me. Yet, it’s a collection of words presented in a chronological order, so does that make it art? If I hooked up a bass guitar and just started whaling into a microphone - making all different kinds of discordant, ugly sounds - put a backbeat to it, and screamed at the top of my lungs, should I or shouldn’t I put it up for fifteen dollar digital download on Bandcamp?

The internet has seemingly removed any and all limitation from citizens creating art. Not that there was any ever in place to begin with, but the advent of the Information Age has removed noticeable barriers in place for independent artists. In releasing this digitally, I’m taking a shot in the dark that anybody will ever even get this deep into my angsty word well. On the other hand, I’m not immediately dealing with the endless hassle of trying to get it to be noticed by publishers and advertisers. There’s a certain feeling that comes with the freedom imposed by the internet - a feeling of: “well if it’s truly good enough, somebody will see it.” Everybody is given an equal shot to make an artistic impact on this platform. Somebody like Kevin Abstract can assemble and mastermind an entire behemoth of an artistic collective like Brockhampton exclusively from behind a liquid crystal display. There is seemingly no huge barrier separating stardom and normal life anymore.

At the same time, is the internet really making that much of a difference in terms of who proves to be remembered by time or not? Perhaps it’s simply too early to tell the difference between the stardom of old entertainment and the new phenomenon of internet stardom. There’s people who have seamlessly merged the two; figures like Rowan Blanchard regularly meld a traditionally held image of a star and a quintessential new-age voice for intellectualism in young people. Yet, where do the similarities between the two eras’ different methods to fame end? Where do you separate the faces and voices who genuinely want to use their newfound attention for good from simple talking heads?

In a way, I’m sure this is an immeasurable quality that will continue defying measurement until the internet ceases to be as dominating as a cultural force as it currently is. However the very nature in which the internet subverts these questions altogether is worthy of critical analysis. What always comes to my mind immediately when I think of the differences between old and new media are album releases. It used to be the case that album releases were nationally celebrated holidays with fans and critics eagerly awaiting the day that everyone would have access. Of course, as technology advanced and MP3’s (and ultimately streaming) took hold of the music market, the most impactful way to release a record ended up being to simply release it like a fiery cannonball into the endless abyss of the internet. Acts like Death Grips come to mind - getting established critics and fans alike to react in an absolute surprised stupor upon the arrival of new music. Yet, artists everywhere soon were on the same wave that they and other predecessors were. Why hold onto this for ourselves, going through all the terribly tedious bureaucratic processes to release it when we can just do it ourselves?

An upload onto a social media platform can truly have the cultural and political impact of a well-known old media creator unveiling a poignant new project. Countless examples of this exist, and if I were to simply sit and list every relevant release of media that I’ve consumed that was released in this manner, I’d be typing this essay for hours.

Does the stardom experienced by the Cash Me Ousside girl match the impact of other pop culture figures of decades in the past? What is the power of the internet meme as compared to the pre-internet meme? This question is, by nature, before my time. This should say something to the current generation of youth thinkers and how their images of fame and societal impact are being shaped.

Still, at the root of the phenomena, the question of what exactly qualifies as art on the internet remains in place. In the past twenty years, humanity has developed technology capable of allowing humanity to scream into a communal abyss of words and ideas with each other. Does the act of even partaking in that count as some kind of gigantic artistic concept? I’m positive there are people using the idea of social media in itself as an artistic canvas - but what distinguishes that from simply posting a picture of a painting?

I think I took a break from the constant analysis of specific events to ask myself this question because I’m frankly still paranoid that these essays will be viewed as incoherent nonsense - or worse - not viewed at all. I want some kind of hypothetical outside voice to tell me whether my undertaking of this project will be worth it or not. Yet I know if I were to actually ask any of my real life peers, they’d either assure me it was in the order of being nice or shrug because they were as clueless as I. I’m also positive if I asked random people on the internet, they’d tell me I would probably be better off slurping car exhaust (they’re just kind of like that in a sociopathic, adorable way). Truly the only resource one has when deciding to partake in a media-related endeavor of any kind is themselves. Whether you’re making a website or a movie, there’s always going to be a seed of doubt that your work will go misunderstood or even lambasted. As Michael Scott once quoted, however, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

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ON THE PAUL BROTHERS

YouTube will always have a dear place in my heart. More than that, YouTube will have an unmatched, unforgettable piece of my brain due to it being my primary source of entertainment during my childhood. Sure, I knew of multiple television shows that piqued my interest, but I could simply DVR those. Growing up, television was something that I indulged in while eating food. Why would I want to put up with advertisement breaks and content that didn’t really suit my tastes? I could simply walk into the other room, open up a laptop, and view anybody I wanted making content on whatever happened to be claiming my interests at the time. This became the sole reason why YouTube ended up eventually forcefully grabbing all of the attention I had to give to any kind of video-based media platform.

From my earliest memories - being ten years old - I had the same exact account on the website that I do now. Trying to sit here and remember every single thing I watched would be tedious and incredibly cringeworthy to me. There are, however, channels and personalities I found at a very young age that became instrumental in shaping my own identity both as an online media content consumer and as a human being in general. John and Hank Green of Vlogbrothers quickly became a tremendous inspiration to me in the way I handled myself, the way I pursued knowledge, the way I pursued friendship, and the way I went about attempting to accomplish my goals. Stuart Ashen- of his own namesake channel Ashens - became a haven for interesting technology and gaming related content for me, further elevating my love for snarky deadpan humor and exposing me to countless British references I didn’t (and still don’t) understand. Even as of more recently, people like Anthony Fantano have been tremendous influences on my political ideologies, sense of humor, writing style, and love of music. What I’m trying to get at is the fact that exposure to YouTube early in my life had a significant impact on the man I’ve ended up in the midst of turning into. When you have such a colossal smash hit on that website, as the Paul brothers had, attention is seemingly ripped away from traditional media. Kids all across the country are all tuned into one thing that their elders aren’t, which alerts parents and sends a shock wave up the spine of pundits.

It turns out that their concern wasn’t misplaced at all as the Paul brothers soon ended up becoming perhaps the most hated duo in the history of the site. If you’re even somewhat informed of the nature of these two, the Logan Paul suicide controversy is probably ringing in your brain right now - rising like an obnoxious asshole of a zombie from the depths of your mental capacity for shock and outrage. Yes, the most recent and most prevalent example of the Paul brother’s own inability to analyze their own douchebaggery is perhaps the most sickening thing either one of them has ever done. Yet, there’s something about the Paul brothers that continues to infest the mindset of young kids all across the country. Douchebags have been popular on the platform for as long as I’ve been around - and I used to lap it right up. I watched the “Doin’ Your Mom” video on repeat like twenty times as a dumb kid. Where someone like Ray William Johnson was simply brandishing himself as a douchebag and making inappropriate jokes to hook young viewers, there’s something far more troubling about how the Paul brothers handle themselves. There is no acting like a douchebag for the Paul brothers. There is no acting for the Paul brothers. Let me dive a bit deeper into exactly what I mean with that statement.

Jake and Logan Paul got huge using an app called Vine. For all those of you reading this over twenty-eight who’ve also been in the process of beginning to turn their home into a rock, Vine was an app that had a huge influence on pop culture in the recent years of my life. With a six second video time limit it is also, perhaps, the most unworthy platform to have that gigantic of a share of the social consciousness. That isn’t to say that I hate - or even dislike - the app. I genuinely enjoy many of the memes that have come out of the platform that have been quoted endlessly by my friends, and there’s been an absolute ocean of incredibly talented people who have done remarkable things with six second videos. I simply just never used the app as none of the content creators I had already been subscribed to were using it to do anything of note - again, kind of hard to do with only six seconds. Vine was genuinely a bit after my time. I was never aware of the Paul brothers’ influence on the site, and as such, children across the country.

All things that I eventually come to a complete and total position of apathy on must come to an end. In late 2016, news broke that Vine would be shutting down. Creators who had been designing, creating, and editing content specifically for Vine had to turn somewhere else in order to make their e-money. The Paul brothers turned to YouTube vlogging. While I do commend the work ethic and motivation it takes to flesh out your brand of six second videos into algorithm-pleasing lengthy content, there was a distinct difference between the two platforms that ended up becoming apparent once the Paul brothers started getting in trouble.

You see, the Pauls had fallen victim to a mindset that anybody in the entertainment industry can easily fall into. By simply being themselves; by making content that they thought would be loud and flashy enough to appeal to the same demographic of kids that flocked to them on Vine, they quickly became some of the most popular creators on the entire platform. It then became terribly apparent that they’d let that go to their heads, quickly plummeting into an endless tailspin of god-awful PR and shameful news stories. The Pauls had stopped being able to separate the series from the person. They’d stopped being able to distinguish the Jake and Logan Paul that had become commonplace in the homes of thousands upon thousands of kids and the Jake and Logan Paul who were just normal people making content for the internet.

They’d suffered one of the worst cases of vloggeritis I’ve ever seen in over a decade of stomaching vloggers. Their on-screen persona of the loud, cocky, self-assured kids spilled itself into their home life and ambitions. Fans of theirs might read this at some point and criticize me for even mentioning that at all - as if that fact in itself is the saving grace that salvages the Pauls’ content. Yet, I’d be hard pressed to agree that appearing as spoiled, petulant children to a country full of people with pitchforks at the ready was their goal. Sure, the content is designed primarily for children, but there’s an unmistakable personality trait the two share that’s apparent in every single one of their videos. It’s this very same trait that’s gotten them into hot water with other YouTube channels, the news media, and generally anyone else who tries to go through every day with something resembling a sense of empathy.

Take, for example, the infamous KTLA-5 news story that the local Los Angeles station did on Jake Paul. In one of the most cringeworthy, representative moments either of the Paul brothers have ever partaken in, Jake climbs the back of a KTLA-5 van. A member of their news team, speaking with a tone that’s gloriously nothing short of a parent mentally sick of reprimanding their spoiled brat child (but not actually reprimanding them at all), tells Paul that he “wouldn’t do that”. Paul then looks at the man - probably questioning how his career in journalism got him to the point of parenting somebody else’s chronically infantile rich toddler - and asks the simple question: “Why?”

Why? Well, to start, probably because normal everyday people don’t randomly climb onto vehicles that don’t belong to them. Or maybe because doing something like that would bring further endless masses of tween girls to spill onto your street as a horde of monsters to the endless dismay of your neighbors? Probably, mostly, however, it’s simply because it makes you look like a giant asshat.

Now this is what sits at the very core of the raging hatred over the Paul brothers. That personality trait I mentioned earlier plays into my previous essay on shock value, somewhat, as I believe the personality trait of child-like violent defiance of anything and everything resembling older people’s definition of basic decency is especially appealing to children on the internet. I’ve mostly subconsciously blocked the cringeworthy examples of this I used to love from my childhood; I’ve at least definitely unsubscribed to the more egregious ones. I used to giggle every time I’d hear a let’s player I liked drop cuss words like they were nothing because I was a dumb kid once, too. Yet, where that differentiates is the fact that most let’s players have to have an interesting personality to even stay relevant to their fanbase anymore. It’s much, much harder to record yourself screaming or swearing while playing some video game and expect to get the immediate exposure that you would even get a couple of years ago. This has resulted in some of the most popular content creators of my childhood having to dial back their gnarly brand of humor somewhat and focus on making content that appeals to a wide variety of demographics. Myself and other children have laughed more than once at IDubbbz making some outlandish joke that definitely would qualify as poor taste to a more traditionally-minded content consumer. This situation differentiates as well, however, because anybody who watches him or like-minded YouTubers will be able to tell you that there’s an underlying purpose for just about everything he does. Whether it be for the sake of a clever reference, well-timed punchline, or social statement, there’s always a method to the madness.

An example of content that represents the same sort of pleasure center that gets activated in the mind of a child - but importantly doesn’t seem well constructed, genuine, or especially thoughtful - would be the Paul brothers’ YouTube stylings. From dancing like a complete and total buttface and spitting on the culture of a place you don’t understand to lighting a mattress on fire out in the open in a residential area, the Paul brothers represent the antithesis of safe and controlled release of negative emotion. They represent the mindset of the kids you probably couldn’t stand throughout grade school. What’s all the worse, though, is that I don’t think they even know it.

When the news broke that one of the biggest content creators on one of the biggest platforms on the internet had gone specifically to an area infamous for being the location of suicide attempts, your stomach probably turned. When you had read (or for the more unfortunate of you, seen) that he had then proceeded to not only see a dead body while filming, but point his camera at it and turn it into a prop for his audience of children to see, you probably declared him magnificently stupid. When you had seen that video that surfaced after, compiling all the tremendously dumb shit that he did to disrespect the people and culture of a foreign country after coyly prefacing the entire trip with being “all about the respect”, you probably actively, vocally cursed the man out.

I can’t bring myself to do so, however. See, I used to be a loudmouthed, obnoxious child as well, and I have a hard time believing that the Paul brothers had any idea of the impact they were truly going to have on the world. I can’t speak for their upbringing, but their sounds ring much to the same tune of kids who have always gotten what they want. They were gifted an enormously large fanbase of ravenously loyal kids simply by continuing to be who they always were. Any kid in that situation - realizing that they’ve become famous simply for pointing a camera at themselves and filming whatever pops into their brain -  would be totally and completely awestruck. If they were someone like the Pauls, they’d do what they did as well: totally double down on the premise of your personality driving the content. They’d especially want to do this in the move from Vine star to instant YouTube titan.

I believe everything we’ve seen from the Paul brothers has been thoroughly genuine. The reactions that Logan gave after seeing that hanging corpse were not the reactions of somebody with no emotion in their body. They were the reactions of somebody who had genuinely been shocked to the core by what they saw. The glare in his popped eyes tell you everything you need to know about the true feelings of humanity lying beneath that blonde shell. The problem arose when he was faced with an internal dilemma, letting his ultimately fatal case of vlogeritis finally claim him. “Should I stop filming, wrap up shop, go home, post on all my social media about how there won’t be a daily vlog, and then tell everybody about it later - or, continue to be the exact kid that got me all these fans in the first place?” Making his decision, he succumbed to his condition. The online persona and the person had become one. The singularity had occurred.

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ON PIZZAGATE

*ba dum tiss*.

I’m seriously considering simply leaving the above line as the only commentary I have on the conspiratorial internet behemoth that is Pizzagate. Yet, as with everything, I don’t believe Pizzagate is simple as it seems on the surface. In fact, I think it represents the emotional frame of thousands upon thousands of people that had an impact on the previous presidential election. I’ve touched upon it previously, but an overlooked crowd of middle class Americans has been largely impactful upon the social climate of the country recently. Getting even more specific, vitriolic people on both sides of the aisle have been particularly impactful online. On sites like Reddit, you have near-constant liberal posts hitting the front page. Of course, due to the nature of Reddit, your front page will resemble whatever you want it to. That leads me to the opposite side of the political spectrum, where the online presence of propaganda and like-minded people was far more loud and boisterous.

You could expect to find people who were firmly in the corner of the Donald (and as such, the GOP) on subreddits such as /r/The_Donald, 4chan’s /pol/ board, and just about everywhere on 8chan. Plus, they regularly pop up in areas unrelated to politics entirely to simply make a political statement. Yet, there was one movement that was birthed on image boards that remains the atypical example of both the effectiveness of chans to organize and tackle a specific goal, and the shining example of just how jaded and removed from reality those image boards’ political opinions have become. That movement of course being the ill-fated Pizzagate.

If you’re new to Pizzagate, don’t read any further. Ok, of course I want you to read further, but you’re probably going to end up saving yourself a few brain cells if you never learn about it. To oversimplify, Pizzagate was the hellbent determination that /pol/, 8chan, and other desolate corners of the internet possessed to expose noted members of the Democratic party including - gasp - Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and more. Expose them for what, exactly? Years of complacency with how corrupt the entire system of legislating has become in this country? No, no, that would make far too much rational sense.

No, these “chans” as they’re called were utterly determined on exposing a secret child sex ring taking place amongst Washington elites. Seriously.

What a completely and totally strange coincidence that every political and business head that are ritualistically spat on in internet conservatism circles (Bezos, Clinton, etc.) were exactly the ones participating in this satanic child sex ring? I mean, those are some incredibly convenient human rights violations. However, Pizzagate was taken entirely too seriously in many rings on the internet. Soon, keyboard trolling /b/ browsers were proclaiming themselves internet detective day in and day out, rigorously analyzing the social media posts of a random Washington pizza & ping-pong joint. They had established a ridiculously ludicrous system of codewords and symbols that they believed were being used to subliminally let others know of their evil child sex ping-pong pizza program.

If only this hilarious bit of paranoid delusion were contained to its rightful slimy corner of the internet. If only, if only. It wasn’t - and soon everybody who kept an ear to the ground for political developments online had to deal with (and hysterically laugh at) people who were trying to piece together subliminal public clues of a satanic sex ring. In a post a propagator of the conspiracy made on Reddit, he states:

“Everyone associated with the business (referring to Comet Ping Pong - the establishment speculated to be the head of the child sex ring and the unfortunate bearer of ridiculous paranoia) is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza.”

Ignoring the end sentence which makes a baseless allegation (except for the “of course pizza” which is comedy gold), the statement in itself reveals the terribly paranoid nature of the entire conspiracy. Finding the “clues” of Pizzagate became such a grasping-at-straws fest that the person relaying the message to the public has to put a “semi-” prefix at the beginning of all of their allegations. “Yeah, they’re constantly talking about having sex with kids. No, no, everything on the social media page of a pizza joint referring to pizza is a metaphor. You have to look deeper, man.”

I wish I could just simply enjoy basking in the overt stupidity of this. Yet more so than that, I simply wish the right-wing minded internet browsers of the world wouldn’t have gotten so drawn in by a thoroughly ridiculous bit of terrible fiction. Unfortunately, conspiracies like this make their rounds in online conservative circles so frequently, some people believe them to be genuine news. Any ol’ random Kremlin factory can spit out multiple webpages about how random Democrats that get Republican voters’ hate boners raging are literally satanic child molesters and they’ll instantly believe it. They’ll go to the lengths of scanning page after page to confirm their own preposterous preconceived notions. Before analyzing the situation and thinking “maybe Hillary Clinton isn’t deathly ill” or “maybe Barack Obama isn’t a Kenyan Muslim” or “maybe John Podesta doesn’t worship the devil” or “maybe Jeff Bezos doesn’t engage in giant satanic cooking rituals”, they’d be willing to constantly try and connect unrelated dots together to fit any of these situations. Why? Because simply anything would be more preferable than having to admit that the person that the internet has trained you to hate passionately perhaps isn’t cartoonishly evil. These people hate to admit their own faults so much, they’d rather double down and proclaim to the heavens that random people they don’t know, never have met, and never will meet are Satan-loving child fuckers than admit that they might be nice people.

And I wonder why we can’t have nice, civil political discussion. Stupid me.

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ON AMERICA & SOCIALISM

One thing that I want to make as clear to you as I possibly can, humble reader, is that I love America. I may bust near-constantly on the social trends, political leadership, and policy of this dear country but I wouldn’t trade it for any other nation in the world. Sure, I genuinely believe that democratic socialist countries’ standard of living is comparatively much higher than ours’, but there’s something to be said about what the country represents at its core that makes it so appealing to people on every side of a political argument. The fact that we even have political arguments at all is something that I should wake up and be thankful for every day. The fact that this book might even get read at all is a direct byproduct of the fundamental principles that make this country the greatest in the goddamned world. Nationalism by itself isn’t inherently good or bad in my mind, it’s led to both some of the greatest achievements in the history of the modern world along with some of the most absolutely abhorrent atrocities. Where I begin to take issue with the idea of nationalism is when people try and convince myself and others that criticizing the party and/or leadership in power currently is unpatriotic.

Every single word I’ve typed in this document bleeds of my love for this country. The casual thought that I might have been unlucky enough to be born in some autocratic hellhole is cliche yet definitely worth a second thought when it pops into my brain. If I were to be in some other country (one coming specifically to mind that rhymes with Lush-uh) I probably would’ve been arrested promptly at the second, third, or if I was inordinately lucky, third essay. The fact that I can criticize the government at all without fear of comeuppance is genuinely, staggeringly, free. I mean this may have more than one thing to do with the fact that I’m a straight, cisgender white man, but I digress.

Please, please, please do not ever try and convince me that speaking ill of my government is unpatriotic. It’s just about the most patriotic thing any citizen of this country could ever hope to do in their lifetime, and it’s nothing special. Everybody does it all the time, whether they know it or not. People who spit phrases to the tune of “he’s still your president you gotta listen to what he says” are missing the entire point of free speech. Nevermind the fact that they were flexing their first amendment right like a bodybuilder at a steroids convention about two years ago to blame Obama for all their problems. However, this argument doesn’t typically fall to one side. There’s an overwhelming amount of disdain that comes from the mind of someone who sees an online reply or in-person conversation that happens to go against the grain of their political nature. I wanted to make this same point at the beginning of my essay on criticism, but with just how volatile the online landscape of political discussion has become I believe it bears repeating.

Stop taking political insults as direct attacks on your character. You are not Donald Trump. You are not Hillary Clinton. Nothing that could ever happen to godlessly birth itself in the mind of yourself or someone you hate could ever hope to have that big of an impact on the grander scheme of politics - at least not over social media. Hell, anything you could think of to truly ravage an administration and the people who admire it won’t even get the people who admire it mad. It’s the same principle that the Republicans played off of to secure the vitriolic, meme-filled support needed to win the 2016 election. When you can garner that response seemingly with the snap of your fingers, you have an instant out. When the heads in charge can seemingly generate political discourse on a complete and total whim, they can absolutely guarantee that there will be far less people having peaceful discussion online.

I still genuinely believe that brashness and honesty are by far the most directly effective means of having young people interpret your message. We don’t like being advertised to, we don’t like being pandered to, we don’t like a softie and we don’t like a dictator. However, taking the same low road as the Republicans while entirely missing the point of swinging high at the same time will yield similarly, terribly angry results as in the 2016 election. Brashness, honesty, and vulgarity will win the minds of young voters. When you’ve got them initially hooked, however, you have to explain to them why their ideas could be incorrect. You’ve got to educate without pandering. Young people aren’t stupid - they’re the exact opposite, actually. They’re bright, youthful, capable minds who simply don’t know all the facts yet. Take whatever glorious, brief time they give you to honestly and genuinely implant your message. This is what I was talking about in my disinformation essay when I talked about taking tips from the way Roger Stone works. You have to lure kids in with anti-conformity, anti-establishment, and anti-totalitarian rhetoric, because the kids are sick and tired of the constant gridlock and endless nothings spilling out of Washington - regardless of what side of the political spectrum they fall on.

Yet at the same time there’s something to be said for just how thoroughly and disgustingly that the Republicans have managed to turn political hate into an art form. They use it to siphon nearly every drop they can from the pockets of their voters and lobbyists alike. Any attack against platform or policy is usually met with some kind of crazily inflammatory, even more vicious attack against whoever happens to be trying to oppose them that day. That’s usually followed up with the assuring facade of nationalism - the ever-paying golden ticket that lets policy makers do whatever the hell they want while still telling their impressionable voterbase that they’re doing it for the love of their country.

What I truly see as nationalism isn’t defined by what you believe in. It’s broader than that - it’s an unrequited love of your country that you’d be willing to fight tooth-and-nail to defend. I truly feel I have nationalism inside my heart. I engage in the traditions of my country from endangering the existence of all of my limbs on the Fourth of July to barbecuing every type of animal I can find in a supermarket and letting them all be more equal than one another in my stomach while watching football. I love my country. I love it so much, I’m willing to stand up and talk smack against the people who are in charge of it so as to make sure that the morals I truly believe to be the backbone of this country continue to stand until I’m collecting retirement checks. Nearly every American has this in their heart. I’m positive it was this same driving anger that led thousands upon thousands of people to believe dumb lies about Obama’s birth certificate. The same force that drives me to want to protest; to even write this book is the same force that that man had. The force that makes us all want to enjoy a life of love and liberty.

You might be wondering where socialism plays into all of this. Well, I’m a socialist. Before you get ready to polish up those brand new American-made pitchforks, listen to why I think that socialism and democracy can not only coexist - but are fundamental to each other’s survival.

Socialism is about as easy to sit and explain as is quantum physics. OK, the hyperbole is a bit strong with that one, but on the other end of it - is it really? Sit and ask yourself (especially if the mere mention of socialism gets your commie-hating blood boiling) if you truly know what the word “socialism” means. I don’t. Seriously, I’m a self-described socialist and I haven’t even the slightest fleshed-out political idea of the serious denotations of that word. I’m not a bearded Marxist, I’m not advocating that the means of production be forcefully ripped from the rich into the hands of the people. I’m simply advocating that those rich who currently hold all the means of production have to pay their fair share: properly, regularly, and increasingly based on how much they earn.

Socialism is, by nature, regulatory. Republicans have been training voterbases to froth at the mouth with hatred at the word “regulation” since the Ronald Reagan days. Yet just as how “trickle-down economics” were an altogether brilliant scam to try and get genuine American people to believe that helping the richest people in the country financially would somehow help them, the near-constant rhetoric of deregulation and “job creators” still flows out of the mouth of the GOP to this day. Let me make this abundantly clear: I don’t identify as a Democrat. Yes, I agree with many of their social stances and I largely view them to be the lesser of two evils in the two party system, but I disagree with many of their practices. I believe that they actively play into this constant deregulation nightmare, never truly being willing to stand up to the richest in the country until things get so catastrophically terrible (ala 2008) that they’re just about forced to campaign on regulation and social programs. Turns out, when the richest of the multinational conglomerates are given an unjust amount of power over the economic climate of the country, bad things tend to happen for the majority of the country. “Well”, the youth of America cries out, “no shit.”

I’m a socialist because I totally and honestly believe it’s what’s necessary to bring the United States out of its perceived funk. I think a potential answer to many of the country’s long standing economic and social positions can be found within the basic principles of socialism. Impoverished metropolitan and rural areas creating money for the country yet simultaneously not having enough citizen income to go around? Social programs. Money to pay for social programs? Punish the rich for moving their taxes around offshore with an iron fist. I’m certainly very far from the only person who believes this, however. One of the most recent, incredibly popular presidential candidates among the youth was a self-described democratic socialist. I’m definitely not saying that I feel that the answers to all of these questions lie in socialism, but isn’t about goddamn time that no-nonsense capitalists and socialists hear each other out?

A free market is absolutely, totally, no-question-at-all, one hundred and ninety nine percent essential to a free country. Any centrally planned economic system is doomed to fail at launch. Classes will always exist, the American dream will always exist, and unfortunately poverty and class struggle will never cease to be a genuine problem on the minds of the American people. Socialism isn’t this terrible, dirty word. It shouldn’t conjure up images of Stalin or Hitler no badly how much the Republicans want it to. It shouldn’t conjure up any picture in your mind except for that of good ol’ incredibly boring economic policy. Socialism - at least the way it’s integrated into American politics - is nothing more than policy that aims to funnel money directly into the hands of the American people instead of in the hands of the rich.

Listen to me - I’m completely and totally aware that the bureaucracy of modern day America is just about all but the worst thing ever. There are people desperately trying to suck the government dry for every singly dollar they can get. I’m definitely even willing to say that a portion of those people are people that genuinely don’t deserve it. There absolutely needs to be systems in place to ensure that the money that would be redistributed into the hands of the American people would be going into the hands of honest, hardworking American people who simply want to live a normal life with an income they can sustain themselves off of. However, as I’ve managed to come to that conclusion, I ask you to come to mine as well. Think of all of the people who genuinely need those programs who can’t get them because there’s not enough federal funding or the process is simply much too complicated and terrible. Think of all of the veterans who are currently on hold from receiving what they thought would help secure them a normal life once they returned from their great duty. Those people need the help of the federal government. No matter how you want to look at it, and no matter how much one side of the political aisle tries to convince you they’re freeloaders (while the other side doesn’t really do much of anything), they’re American people who deserve the same quality of life that you and I have - or at least a quality of life that we as citizens can all be proud to put the name “American” on.

How does endlessly giving tax breaks to the rich help these people truly get what you and I both know they deserve? It doesn’t. Granted, neither does the endless hellhole that is your average social security office, but perhaps we could put some funding into that to make it more streamlined and efficient while simultaneously working to make sure the people that receive it are justly receiving it. Taxes are just about the most hated thing in America next to Tom Brady, communism, and text message break-ups. Yet if you can genuinely feel sure that your tax dollars are going towards helping other people - all the while at the same time going towards a government that is going to make sure they have the federal funding necessary to ensure that you yourself have the easiest, most American life you possibly can, maybe you wouldn’t feel so bad about the tax man. Maybe if doing your taxes were as simple for every American as they were for corporate entities trying to funnel their money into endless offshore accounts in Panama, you wouldn’t hate the federal government as much. Maybe - just maybe, if our blind love of capitalism was hit with a good, healthy dose of regulatory socialism, that capitalism would actually be perhaps the freest and most just form of capitalism in the history of the world. It’s something to think about.

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ON DONALD TRUMP AND THE UNENDING VOID OF SADNESS AND APATHY THAT PERVADES HIS BODY EVERY WAKING DAY OF HIS LIFE ONLY BRIEFLY INTERRUPTED WITH MILD STATES OF CONFUSED BEWILDERMENT AND HAPPINESS WHEN TUNING INTO FOX NEWS IN HIS MORNING PAJAMAS

Good, good, now that I’ve drawn the angry conservative in to bash my personal qualities - that was a joke. In fact, I wanted to actively parody the near-constant ad hominem attacks that our president is shellacked with on a daily basis. Not to say that I haven’t, don’t, and won’t continue to make these jokes with regularity in the future because obviously I will. They’re easy vehicles for cheap laughs at the expense of an untouchable man in a golden palace. Are they really just jokes, though? Or is the general public’s usage of these jokes detrimental to the entire value of political discussion in America?

I wanted to make the title of this essay as long, drawn-out, and full of liberal cliche attacks on the President as I possibly could to illustrate a point. Me typing those words just now didn’t do jack shit. Every time you get on the computer to loyally defend your chosen political side as if it were your family or your favorite professional sports team, you add nothing to the political conversation. I can speak from experience, as I have months on my resume of adding nothing to the political conversation. I’m eighteen years old, so most of my previous experience with politics has been fairly relevant to my upbringing in general: mostly online, mostly angry, mostly jaded. This is largely the case with both sides’ loud minorities in the history of political discussion (with the exception of a few cases). It’s this mentality precisely that I think is getting a newfound rebirth and popularization in the internet age and becoming even more vitriolic and spiteful than perhaps any time in the history of the country. What I wanted to do by typing that header was try and capture the attention of somebody who would take my ad hominem attacks on the president as a personal assault on themselves. I want to tell you, dude or dudette or non-specific dude-person, that the way you’ve been handling both response to criticism and political discussion as a whole is fundamentally flawed. You should be analyzing arguments, not taking them to heart and trying to fling as much poop as you can back at them. You should be picking apart the logical fallacies behind statements while simultaneously trying to instruct your enemy why you feel a certain way. At the end of the day, they’re not even your enemy at all. They’re your fellow American citizen, and just because you have different views on how the country should be run doesn’t mean that if you were both drunk in a bar and “Closing Time” came on, you both wouldn’t scream it at the top of your lungs. The animosity that’s allowed by being behind a screen weirdly tends to disappear when near even the same exact people that provoked the animosity to begin with. If we can learn how to treat people with the same respect, dignity, and general apathy on the internet in the same way we (or, at least, most of us) would in person, the internet would be a far less scary place to have reasonable conversation.

I think it’s partly this shift in tone that inspired me to write this collection of essays - at least subconsciously. Along with simply documenting the state of my mind at eighteen, I wanted to be able to present my views in a way that was respectable and entertaining to everybody. There’s such a small amount of content in the world that’s political by nature yet attempts to include everybody in the discussion. What’s the point in arguing about how the world works if you can never meet on the middle on absolutely anything? *cough* CONGRESS *cough*

No, I want to be able to criticize Donald Trump and have everybody laugh. Not because I even feel particularly strongly about the man himself, but because I think it could serve as a good place to start a serious, intelligent discussion about the state of the world and what good we’re doing by the impoverished peoples of America. I want this discussion to take place between all people, even people who - by the standard interpretation of my political beliefs - would be my “enemy”. I genuinely long to hear the educated opinions of those who see the world differently than I do. If it means I have to crack a joke about Obama every time I crack one about Trump, than Obama used so many drones you’d think he was a middle-aged dad who just lost his wife and was desperately looking for a new hobby to throw all his money at.

Somewhat relatedly, I also used such a ridiculous header to talk about the man himself. See, these ad hominem attacks on Trump get us absolutely nowhere. They got us to the same point that all the ad hominem attacks on the Bushes and the Clintons did. They got us jack shit. Sitting around and insulting the president because of a few headlines you happened to catch in your preferred social bubble is the most quintessentially lazy form of activism in modern day America. Again, not to say that I haven’t done truckloads of this myself. Yet every time I see a story, headline, or comment where we’ve had to make something up about Donald Trump to insult him, all I’m left thinking is that people seriously have to be dying to make fun of this man to be creating new things to ridicule him for. Ridicule him for the amount of time he’s spent playing golf (ninety-five trips to golf resorts since inauguration and it’s only March 5th of the following year), ridicule him for his transparent hatred of the media (except the ones that like him, obviously), and ridicule him for essentially running the supermarket brand version of a family oligarchy from inside the White House. Don’t freaking ridicule him for his hair, or his physique, or his word choice (ok, maybe his word choice). We have so many real things to criticize about him, falling into petty personal attacks and making up false stories about his negligence take away every ounce of real power that we have as critics. Analyze and then attack. Not the other way around.

ON DEPRESSION, OVERTHINKING, AND COLD FEET

Nights like last night are the exact opposite of the gloriously free nights that I wrote about in the introduction to this project. During nights like that I feel that writing is my only salvation. The effortless way in which words seem to fly off of my fingers provides me one of the greatest highs I've ever felt. I’ve sat in school with headphones in looking absolutely stupid as I'm focusing on some piece of music while I close my eyes and let the slams of keys be heard by everyone around me. When I'm confident in my writing, it truly feels as though I've gained my self-confidence back and more. Nights like last night are the kind of nights that make me afraid to even stop working on my writing. That tidal wave of self-loathing and apathy is one of the most terrifying things I've ever felt, and even though I've managed to escape it's clutches a lot more as of recently, I still find myself occasionally succumbing to its death grip.

I don't want to say that my version of depression is the same as any other teenager's because it isn't. Every single person goes through something completely different. I only want to simply try and put you in the shoes of a normally optimistic kid who sometimes falls victim to his own brain constantly questioning why he's not good enough.

The worst part is that every time something comes up that makes me doubt myself, I usually end up forgetting what it was in the midst of all the wallowing. What I can remember like the back of my hand is the vivid mental hell of overthinking; letting one self-loathing thought devolve into another related self-loathing thought and so on. I thought about the two essays I had just recently written and suddenly wanted to scrap them both. Scrolling through my headings, I'd ask myself “Did I really think that was funny? Who the hell am I kidding?”

The one thing you have to understand about teenage (at least my teenage) overthinking is that it's illogical and completely and totally unrelenting in its power. One thing can set off a complete chain reaction of chaos and sadness. I’d go from “no one's going to read this” to “nobody values my societal opinions” to “no one even values my opinions” to  “nobody thinks about me” to “nobody gives a single fuck about me”. I sat in my bedroom and thought about the fact that I had just written a poem I was incredibly proud of about twelve hours earlier in the day. After all the overthinking, when I even remembered the fact that I had written a poem, I scolded myself for not truly suffering enough in my life to warrant anybody wanting to read anything I've written. To myself, I wasn't even good enough at being sad.

I began to sit absolutely motionless on my bed, confident that if I looked at my phone I would see something that would lead me to hasty and completely vicious self-criticism. I simply begun talking out loud into the air. I directed chaotic thought after chaotic thought, questioning  whether or not anybody ever even took me seriously to begin with. I broke down in tears as I haplessly sobbed about how my upbringing made me feel that I was actually losing my mind. The constant need to air out my emotions, the lack of real communication with people I truly love being around, and the near-constant gaslighting I’ve endured throughout my life all tend to pile up and break me down at once. I still feel that I’m going completely insane in my core, regardless of how much better I feel when I wake up.

I wish this were the part of the essay where I could take up some self-assuring tone and let you know that this overthinking will go away in due time. I'm not entirely sure it will ever go away at all. I think that piece of me has always existed from the time I was small. I don't know what particularly brought it around for the first time, but I do know that it's been a part of my brain for as long as I've had analytical thoughts. Even since had the ability to criticize, my own psyche has been a pristine target for it.

What I do want to emphasize to a reader in this passage is that your teenager's cries of angst and discomfort are so vividly real. Please never doubt the emotional stress endured by your average teenager. School is such a breeding ground for everything negative a child can develop. I see so many of my fellow kids around me riddled with anxiety due to the amount of schoolwork they have to do. I saw so many of my fellow kids pressured into doing as many extracurriculars as possible, only to spread themselves so thin as to not even feel like a child at all anymore. While I don't blame the concept of schooling for this - that'd be ridiculous - there's something to be said about the very real weight that kids my age and younger feel every day. What kind of place in this world are we really aiming to give our children through the public school system? What kind of lessons about stress and self-confidence does one even learn? I know that every single kid I've ever met has dealt with those first hand, but typically it's all by themselves.

While I know for a fact that depression won't simply go away by ignoring it, there is a message of hope and unworthy advice that I'd love to offer to my fellow age group peers. Find what you love doing and keep doing it, please. When I realized while doing some English class journal that I absolutely loved being able to type away my frustrations with everyday life, it was as if a million tons were off of my shoulders temporarily. Find that thing that can make you forget the monotony that is the average middle class public school experience. Take unfiltered pride in being able to make some kind of statement that isn't based off of your ability to regurgitate random information prescribed to you by your state government. Go out of your way to learn about the things that really move your heart. I oversimplify and say that one particular thing is getting me through my adolescence time and again, but truly the one thing that’s allowed me to feel that I still have some kind of connection to the outside world is writing. Music as well, but writing has been the one thing I’ve always gone back to as to remind myself that I haven’t completely lost my mind just yet. I’m still going to use all the time that I’m given on this planet to try and input my own opinions and leave a lasting legacy. You have to find whatever action or passion gets the butterflies up and through your chest, bursting to bear your creative fruit and deliver it to the world.

I don’t think I’m going to end up writing any more than this essay. I had told myself I wanted to get done with it about two weeks before I hit my self-imposed release date. I’m increasingly worried that the always recurring mountain of terrible overthinking and depression will claim both me and the words I’ve spent months writing up to this point after I decide that I’ve spilled as much as I can onto virtual paper. Yet I’ll always have to tell myself that these writings aren’t just some artistic attempt that I’ll throw out into the world and get nervous over - they’re an unadulterated piece of myself. They’re an active snapshot of where my life is right now and how my choices and experiences have shaped the way I see the world. If even one kid out there happens to read this far and gets inspired to do something similar for a similar purpose - whether it be to appease their own mind or to scream their will and testament into a world that many people tell them doesn’t value what they have to say, then releasing this would be already worth it to me. I mean, I don’t think that’ll happen. I’m actually pretty positive it never will. Wait, is it too late to get cold feet on this whole “book” thing?

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DEDICATIONS

For Andrew Sauter - you continue to remain the absolute rock of my life. I truly wouldn’t have anything resembling the balls to even undertake a project like this if I didn’t know I’d have somebody like you cheering me on from the sidelines. Everything I ever amount to in my life can be traced back to lessons and support you’ve given me growing up. The unconditional love and criticism you’ve given me have shaped me into what I resemble this very day. I’ll appreciate you until the day I’m cremated - and even then. Always take that with you, for whatever it’s even worth.

For Thomas McGinley - if you’re reading this Pop, please know that I appreciate everything you’ve done for not only me, but everybody in the family. You’ve been at the center of everything in my life, constantly being everywhere me and my family have needed you to be - including lugging me back and forth to school for over a decade. Families everywhere would be lucky to have such an amazing and reliable man to model their offspring after.

For Mr. Lenert - for shaping my analytical mind and creating the journal assignments that subconsciously led me to wanting to write in essay form to begin with. From developing and brandishing my love of deadpan humor to sharing obscure pop culture references throughout my days at school, you’ve remained one of the largest influences on the parts of my brain that I genuinely love getting to expand. Please know that I view you as having the utmost positive impact a teacher can have on their student, and lessons you’ve taught me will pop up in my brain ad infinitum.

For Brandon Adams - for remaining my closest friend, even during times where I rightfully didn’t deserve the company of anyone. Throughout everything in my life - from social ineptitude after joining the ranks of older peers and not knowing anyone, to what would end up becoming the most simultaneously painful & healing time in my life, to having a blast at a music festival, basking in the finality of freedom - you’ve been there through it all. I can not think of a single peer I’d have wanted to share good times with more.

For Ryan, Louie, A.J, Uncle Tony, and Aunt Martha - I want you all to know that I miss you immensely and the thought of your house is synonymous with the innocence of childhood in my mind. Any lapse in communication was purely due to personal issues on my end of the commonwealth. My heart will always be with every single one of you and your kin, and the pain you feel couldn't have happened to more undeserving people. I will love you all until the end.

My mother - despite our occasional spurts of batting heads, you’re my mother and I’ll always love and respect you until I die.

My step-father - who has continually been one of the most constant sources of reliability and genuine wisdom in my life.

My grandmother Gram (Kathy) - for always having mine and Andrew’s backs, regardless of whether we fell anywhere on the scale from deadbeats to murderers.

Let’s kick off romance month with the finished version of Path of Sorrow! Yay!