if my head were made of mud, which it is not...

i actually managed to pull myself out of bed yesterday with enough time to go to my eleven am class. oh! lazy i am. so anyway, i'm sitting in my hum drum i never go to sociology class and the chapter my professor is lecturing on is about education. i started thinking that it was actually pretty cool, which i tend to do in this class because she is an excellent teacher, and she was talking about self fulfilling prophecy and all those other things that i ran kritiks on in debate last year and i was writing stuff down that i already knew, thinking "yeah....i can dig this....i should go to this class more often." until something happened...

she started talking about the students of today verses the students of fifteen, twenty years ago (she's sort of old). she was saying how nice it was to be teaching us that we were so very different from the students of before. she was saying how they would sit on the edges of their seats ready to start complaining and questioning what she would tell them. how they were more willing to disrupt class and how they wouldn't do what was expected of them. i think to myself, "wow, they must have been really cool." then she goes on to talk about us, how we're "better". we're all so nice and well mannered and we never disrupt the class. when we're told "hey, you might want this in your notes" the giant mass of four hundred hands all pick up and write it down at once. we don't question what she tells us, we just write it down and will read it again later so that we can get decent grades on her tests and that's enough for us. and she is happy with this fact.

well, i look around through the sea of faces that i am surrounded by and think, "my god, am i the only one who is thinking this is terrible? there must be other people sitting here thinking I AM NOT COMPLACENT!" how wrong i am. four hundred beaming little faces sit there prided on being told that they are "well mannered". i want to stand up. i want to scream, "don't you understand! this is what they want! they want us to stop thinking for ourselves and just listen and repeat. this is not what we should be doing!"

but i don't. i'm not sure if it's because i'm lazy or if it's because i don't want to be thrown out of the class. maybe a little bit of both. or maybe it's because, she's right.

am i part of this well mannered group of people who are willing to do anything so that the boat doesn't rock? damn i hope not. have i become one of the well mannered complaicent future-go-getter american youth culture that i despise? i don't want to be that. i don't see how i can be that. i'm not going down with out a fight.

there's this song or words or whatever you want to call it on the cd the past didn't go anywhere by utah phillips and ani difranco. well, the words are all phillips, but i'm going on here. anyway, it says that "they are gonna strip mine your soul. they're gonna clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked." and this is exactly what we need to be doing--exactly what we are forgetting to be doing. we need to resist. we need to learn to think our own thoughts and come up with our own solutions. i refuse to let some old sociology teacher tell me what i should be like or what i should write down. maybe i just want to write eown everytime she says "the" and fill in the rest later on my own. {sigh} i don't want to be what they're trying to make us all become.

they are teaching us how to be well behaved. they are teaching us how to succumb to authority. they are teaching us how to be exactly like everyone else. they are teaching us how to perpetuate the capitalist ideals. but, i don't want those ideals. i don't like those ideals. i want to do something...something that's ill mannered. i want to burp in public. i want to question everything that someone in power tells me. i want to make sure that other people realize, "hey, i can think for myself."

so tell me, doesn't it bother you to know that people see our generation as the "well mannered" ones. we have been raised with so much control in our lives that we will let anyone dictate anything to us. well, decide now, do you want to be like that? do you want them to clear cut your best thoughts and strip mine your soul? i don't. and i won't let it happen to me.

so what can we do to avoid this from happening. well, i guess first off, when someone reminds you of how nice it is that you're so well mannered not to question, tell them they're wrong. but more importantly, don't let them tell you that. start questioning. start making people explain things and stop following and flowing down the path they want you to take. if you want to change the world you have to do something. you can't just sit there and smile and the demeaning compliments they throw at you to keep you down. walk with a frown on your face. tell someone who's yelling at his girlfriend to leave her be. if someone tells you to be quiet ask why. don't just go along with things. when something feels a little bit wrong, don't leave it be--question why it is and then change it.

the road that they are trying to make you take might not be the right one for you, and more importantly, it might not be the right one for the world. so don't sit idly by and let them tell you what to do. resist! resist so that your voice is heard. resist so that the bad things that are happening will stop. resist so that you can matter again. resist so that the world turns out how it should be, not how it's convenient for authority.

my god, just resist.




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