Things started fine. My Dad was a combat veteran, a Marine in the Pacific theater in WWII. He had to hide in ancestor caves during the hurricane in Okinawa to survive-just one horror story. If we had not pulled all the troopes out of Japan and brought my Dad home I would not exist. So my very existence is tied to our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm a baby of the bomb.
But-Iwas brought up in the land of the Transcendentalists. There's no escaping the culture of literacy if you live in New England, even if you're backwoods working poor, like all my peeps. Rich people-highly educated rich people(they all are)-own everything in New England. They do all the hiring. They tend to believe in spreading the good, which includes the books. You can't escape Rudyard Kipling (I had memorized all the Just-So stories by the time Dr Suess was offered at the local library)Emily Dickenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Austen, or the Brontes, not for the life of you. There's a Shakespeare theater smack in the middle of rural Maine, for cryin' out loud, and it's packed to the gills all summer season. Word gets out about Hamlet's father's ghost, and even local hicks will crowd in to catch that action(backwoods people in Maine are not rednecks, thank you very much. We are hicks. We leave rednecks to the ignorant South, whom we are the betters of. We are all decendants of abolishonists-or, at least that's what we're all told by our Grandmas. Grandmas, not "meeemawws", thank you.
Of course we've got churches. Lots of 'em. But they are kept to their own purposes. People in New England remember that the Pilgrims came here for freedom of religion;it's a point of pride in the region. I dare you to lift your fists about that in a local donut shop.You will lose. And you will be thrown out, without your coffee to go.
So, that was part of the problem. I grew up immersed in the culture of our founding fathers.
Then, there was my liberal arts education. Well, there wasn't much else to choose from. And I sucked at math.
English Lit was my direction; that and theater. You can see how I was already vulnerable to the Deep State mentality. And I fell into it, hard.
The thinking still shows up in my brain on a daily basis.
For example, when I have a bone to pick with somebody, I automatically approach the conflict with a mind open to changing my own point of view or learning from the other party (WRONG! I KNOW!) and presume that if they and I work together we can co-create a mutually satisfactory solution to the problem.
This is the kind of communist-brainwashed thinking the Deep State instills in young, vulnerable minds. I have done some recovery, though. I no longer take my rules for life from the Socratic Method. (Socrates? Who da fuck was he? Socrates sounds like Satan! Close enough! Was Jesus even around with the ancient Greeks yet? Well then they're all burnin' in hell annaways! Everybody knows you get your rules of life from the WWF, not old dead Greek statue guys!Isn't all that Greek stuff porn anyhow?) I know better now. When you have a conflict, you blaze in with the most hurtful fucking insults you can think up, and then you HIT YOUR ENEMY OVER THE HEAD WITH A CHAIR!
YEAH!
I will fit into this world yet!
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