12/20: “We.”

We are living, breathing vessels of history. We stand witness toe vents our children will not understand.

WE, who are no longer scared away by threats of character attacks and ridicule; WE who band together now more than ever; WE who are prophets among sheep, just for opening our eyes. It is our duty to ring the warning bells, WE, the aware, like the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

We are not all intellectuals or writers or poets or philosophers, those ‘above the grade’ elite. Not all of us have that gift of reinterpreting what we see. We don’t sit in at cultural cocktail parties and talk about foreign trade, we don’t band together and act snooty about what cars we drive. We are not the plutocratic socialites, the elite we see mirrored on the other side of the political fence. We do not want to be them. We are the concerned citizens of a crippled nation who understand more about love and understanding and open-mindedness than many of the folks we disagree with, because we are not over-pretentious, and we disagree because we know we stand for something that is right; there is no defensive cruelty or over-the-top character attacks, only quiet utterance of fact, before we fade back from the conflict.

The truth, it’s said, can stand on it’s own. It is as it is, in it’s finality, and, if we lived in a word of sane, level-headed people, the truth would be the end of every argument.

The progressives play on the emotions of the irrational, which always start with youth. We are am emotional and flighty beast, teenagers. We tend to believe the best in people and take their word for sacred truth. Teachers, who we should be able to trust, are still people with bias. Textbooks are written and never questioned. Music is like political scripture, making more sense to us, being more pure, when interpreted by Green Day and Pink than by Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs. Not so much us, but teenagers as a cohesive whole; There are those of us, like myself, who look at these kids and have the urge to bang our heads against a brick wall so we can be on the same level as those still sleeping.

The “re-education”, the lies, the propaganda. Teachers who may mean well pass on the poison; It is regurgitated and spreads and cripples half the population with hate that cannot be tied to anything. It is the venomous way they say, “Dick Cheney,” when they wouldn’t recognize him on the street – This man they hate so completely. It’s in the cheerful way they hugged me after the election, saying how proud they are, not to be American, but of Barack Obama. For “fighting the good fight”. He was the messiah who could heal a broken country, ravaged by a war waged by evil republicans, a country that was rooted in slavery and needed to be regulated by the shackles of affirmative action and white guilt, as if it would save all those people who died in the fields and the boats so many years behind us.

Their worldview never jived with common sense.

They didn’t even understand a word he said, and he said it all so plainly.

I didn’t get how bad it would be, either. All I knew was that this man had socialist ideas and this disturbed me; I never knew how deep the red ran in his blood, marxist corpuscles, thinly veiled veins and plains that we turned away from because we didn’t want to think the worse. We didn’t want to be like those radical, anti-Bush kids, who made no sense but spewed incoherent nonsense and knew only rage. Cynicism. Bitterness. Hopelessness. Kids who had no plan but hated; the girl sitting next to me who called Sarah Palin a cunt. I told her she had some balls talking about experience when Barack Obama was a fuckin’ community organizer, and you know what she did? She turned tail.

The vanished ghost of liberal hypocrisy.

It’s starts with, “I”, the salvation of the soul, the discovery of identity and value and wholeness. Through the loss of religion, or the gaining of a faith, through the rejection of ideas or embracing of literature, when the tinted window in finally smashed and everything comes in clear. The butterflies in your stomach all vanish because you’re standing on solid ground; You are a person, now, who can face yourself with honesty because you know who meets you iin the mirror every morning.

Then, through social networking, the formation of a voice, the fearlessness that comes from security of the soul, it becomes, “We.”

You are not alone.

Being young, it seems like everybody around me is glazed over and braindead, not just because we don’t agree on politics, but because I can feel it; they have no sense of who they are or what they believe in. They are not standing on solid ground. They are inconsistent people who have not taken the time to be alone in their own heads, to listen to those little voices that bring you down to earth and shape you. And once they do that, they’ll be alright. But what they lack makes it impossible to have a real conversation, because they don’t have anything to tie it to, no concrete values or morals, no real solid belief system.And I wonder, “How can you stand not knowing who you are?”

When they come around, they’ll come around. Either that, or they’ll float aimless like the adults I see at protests, the kind who still believe there’s no corruption in government and what the hell are those crazy tea-baggers even talking about? They’re paranoid!

This is where you and I and we all come together. Be the exceptional teenager. Set a new standard for what’s normal in your generation. Provoke people to think and ask questions. Start discussions at the lunch table. Force your generation to face itself before it’s too late.

We can handle this, if we come together.

The truth is addictive and infectious; once you get a taste, it’s never enough.

As Christmas looms, make it a mission; get four classmates or kids in your community on your side about healthcare. Convince them to call or email their senator.

Four people. That’s a manageable number. Start creating that “we” at home.

It always starts with the youth.