While we’re sitting behind our picket fences,behind the wheel of our BMW’s, drownding out living behind the glow of our big screen…do we really realize what goes on behind our quaint suburban gates? The face of humanity isn’t the facade of a life people try to put on it’s not the PTA, it’s not a book club, or shopping everyweekend. It’s struggle, it’s growl of hunger pains beneath the surface of the gutters which we refuse to step foot near, it’s the lonely panhandler asking for some change to get a meal tonight, it’s the mother and her batterd child running from the monster who pushed them down the stairs. What is this society that we speak of? Is it the CEO’s and the Cops that run our towns, or is it the whispers of a more powerfull force at work, the people who run their lives without ever looking at a screen, who live each day to the fullest and never back down from their dreams? My question today is how society measures success…and my opinion opposing exactly that. Everyone is entiltled to their opinion on how they measure their personal success, wether it be how much money they make, their carrer path and title, or their assests, the size of their house, the amount of cilinders in their car, the jewlery they own, or the art they posses.(Giovanni 2007) To be succesfull one must go to school, compleete school, get a college degree, follow a religion,donate money to charity, get a good job, make alot of money, get a pretty wife, buy pointless things, and just become one of the millions of drones following a daily schedule that society has dropped them into. From birth our society grinds it into our brains that in order to be succesfull we have to follow, follow everything everyone else has done before us, with little room to dream, we have to go into a job that already has a title, we have to sit at our cubicles dreading the next day of work, and then hide how we bathe our sorrows at the bottom of the bottle, or at the poker table, or by staring a pornography coming out of our screen…but why do we do this? Money…money is the only conclusion I come to, the monster that runs us all. ” Theese are hard things to remeber in the boss’s office, let alone working at the checkout line at Wal-Mart. The mass media encourages us to feel sentimental about “our” acheivements : the space shuttle soars ,the diseas is cured, nd the star gets the girl at the end of the movie”(Crimethinc 2006) .
In my opinion I see nothing wrong with measuring your success by you, no one else, no one’s rules, no one’s boundarys, no one telling you NO. I say go dream, be a radical, start a revolution, bring change, live your life for you, not for you parents, your colleages, your friends. In the end do you really want to be waking up everymorning thinking ” If I would have taken that one chance when I was 18…I might not be stuck like this today.” I know…I know not everyone is as left-winged as I am, no one belives to be succesfull you have to be able to dream like I do. I feel like in order to be succesfull you must live your life, not get stuck into a system.Attempt an impossible task everyone around you considers ssensless and stupid- you’ll be suprised at what a challenge it is to exist in exile from the world in whick people can make sense of you actions (Crash and Burn 2006). Why not dream the un-obtainable dream and live your life trying to fulfill that, give your life some purpose other than being a slave to Washington,Lincoln,or Jackson. Success the way I view it starts with the readyness to fail, to go try the one thing you never thought you could do, but with the obvious realization that you could fail at this task.” Failing should not be difficult, unless one is invested in success. That it is so hard for most of us to fail even in meaningless ways reveals how much we covet sucess for its own sake, being able to fail fearlessly before others is one of the hardest skills to master; being able to fail before yourself without shame is harder still”(Crash and Burn 2006). Once you leave that well worn in path anything is possible the world can begin to bestow its beauty and gifts upon you, I feel that our society is filled with people blinded by the mass media, they live their lives by veiwing them from a screen. They fear to go out, to explore the unknown, for fear that their wildest dreams will be looked down upon..by everybody else. But there is contradiction to this, from the time we were in kindergarden we were taught to “be yourself”…but if we are blinded by images of people with fast cars, nice suits, big boobs, and plastic surgery…how are we expected to be ourselves? We are lied to…be yourself is just code to…be like everyone else. You are taught to be a doctor or a lawyer or follow some career path your mother or father had, that if you dream to be an artist or a musician..that there is no money to be made there…that it’s impossible to live a “stable” life doing that. I have been their too, in highschool my passion was art and poetry, I was in several honors classes for art and dreamed of traveling the world painting,drawing,and writing about everything I saw. No one told me I couldent do that…but they did say…why would you want that? You cant be successfull painting. You have so much potential you could be a lawyer… You would be so good at that. So I felt stuck, I feared dissapointing everyone around me by choosing such a radicall thing to do…something that wouldent make me money, but it’s an old saying that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s true…it does not. Now two years after I have graduated, Yes I am proud of myself that I am attending college, but I have yet to feel succesfull… What doesnt kill you can only make you stronger, wether it be the mortification of not being able to explain to your parents what you’re doing with your life or the utter heartbreak of giving everything to follow a dream only to see it burn in ashes. (Crimethink 2005).
So I sit here today and I say throw out everything you’ve ever known, follow the unobtainable dream, paint, draw, write, run through the streets naked, fall in love. Don’t fear dissapointing others, fear dissapointing yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with finding success in the arms of your lover, in the ink that bleeds your deepest desires and firey thoughts through the pen, the fist you hold up in resistance to the strains and shackles that have been put around you since birth. To live without fear of money, capitalism,and those who say can’t…to live for you. To practice hedonism to the fullest extent, while still treating others with respect and kidness. To show the world that it’s okay to dream, to follow the words of the revolutionarys and change society for yourself. Success is not your car, it’s not your pretty wife baking cookies in the kitchen, it’s not your windowed office, it’s not your kids getting honor roll, it’s not every image you project to society saying that you are a good citiczen. It’s so much deeper than that…it lies withing the rythm of every heart beat keeping you alive, within every I love you said to your mother and father, to every dream that you’ve ever followd. It lies within you.
