(no subject)

This land is my land. And it is yours. And it is ours.

The important thing is to believe that when it's most difficult, and when people try to make you feel like you're a stranger where you are-- that's when you say, I live here with you.

Take it as you will, but today I woke up and thought, I love this country. Not just the people I agree with-- or the states I wouldn't mind living in-- the point is, I love this land and its people especially when they're torn apart and distrustful of each other and lost. Because home is not where it's cozy or warm or safe-- home is where the heart is, and this is my heart, even if it hurts. Especially when it hurts.


It is hard to say it today, but that's why I'm saying it.


It's not that I don't care who's in office, because I did feel kind of sick-- but mostly numb. I've been so numb for so long. But I know this much-- this is never going to be over until we do stand together, for real. For real.


So. This land is my land, and here I make my stand. I live here with you, fellow Americans. I live here with you. Please don't leave. We all need each other, as hokey as that sounds. We do.

~~ diary of a one-time teenage anarchist.

I suppose at times like this I'm almost tempted to tell my story.

And, in a lot of ways, it's the story of a girl who hated the world.

The way so many people feel about the country right now-- I know very well how that feels, because I'd felt it about the whole planet during my entire adolescence. And I don't even know where to start explaining it, and it's not that I'm saying 'you have no right to feel this way', but it's just so painful to me, having all those memories of hating everything brought back, and just feeling, basically... y'mean this is news? Y'mean people thought things were really okay before?

When I was growing up in inner-city Brooklyn New York, every single aspect of my existence sucked, and I blamed it on The System, on the Way The World Worked, on the way people didn't think and were complacent sheep, on the way being an atheist was more ridiculous in America than being a fundamentalist Christian, on the way money seemed to rule everything, on the way that the school system didn't care about gifted introverted kids or really educating us so much as herding us 'safely' and checking our guns and knives at the door. I was seriously afraid of extreme disaster striking at any moment-- what with the incessant small-scale war in Croatia people thought might explode into WW3, and global warming, and overpopulation, and basically, stupid people everywhere. And remember when we thought random thugs could buy nuclear weapons from Russia and blow up New York City...? Yeah. Also, High School in NYC really sucked and I really doubted the existence of intelligent life in the -world-, forget the country.

I knew I hated society when I came to school the first day of 10th grade, and suddenly there were guards at the door, checking my backpack for weapons; I knew then it wasn't going to get better.

( ...it did, sort of... not really, though. )