“Plans”
Posted on | August 15, 2008 | No Comments
When I was six years old, I kept a notebook with all my plans for an imaginary country I called "Wacky World." It was basically just one one giant roller coaster, because my idea of what made a country great at that age was based on roller coasters.
After I put the finishing touches on the ride, I added candy shops and restaurants and airports. Then residences and court houses and farms. Over the next few years, the island became a model of a functioning society of laws with what I imagined was a living, breathing populace. At some point, I ripped out the pages with drawings of theme parks and pizza restaurants and put a black permanent marker to the bubble-lettered title drawn out on the cover. I renamed the notebook just "Plans."
I was nine years old and in love with policy making.
It was inevitable that I’d start telling everybody that I wanted to be President when I grew up. It was the cute thing about me, my family and teachers decided, like all those adorable dreams children have of being ballerinas and astronauts when they grow up. By the time I turned 15, all those ballerinas had suffered the nature of an insurrection by their respective realities and my fixation started to look just weird. I was the kid with the megaphone at the rooftop claiming that we, the people, could fix this broken system. In my late teens, I risked constant embarrassment (that cruel guillotine of adolescence) to endure my activism because I was in love with humanity and I wanted to fix things for everybody.
I’m 23 now and I don’t love people anymore. Somewhere along my path to maturity and understanding, I got lost in the bitter experiences that challenged my naive idealism. These experiences in love and war shook my grounding and distorted my perception of humanity. Hope became resentment and the open, positive child of my youth grew into a man apart and drinking. All the while, I’ve stubbornly clung to this goal of becoming the leader of the free world, not out of any wish to help those who now frustrate me, but instead from the guilt of not caring anymore. It’s no wonder I live in this state: depressed, confused, and pissed off at the world because of what I’ve gone through for it.
I’ve lost touch with the very humanity that drove me to this career. I’m in a perpetual decline fed by my insistence that people just don’t get it and the skepticism that they ever could. I once understood that it was the differences of experience and opinion in this American life that made the fabric of our culture so diverse and exciting.
If I want to gain back my confidence and charity, I’m going to have to learn how to love all you undeserving bastards again.
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