Don't Lose Touch

You call me disrespectful, I will show you disrespectful.
You call me rebellious, I will damn well show you what rebellious looks like.

If you can denote rebellious as following the rules, doing extra around the house, making good grades in school, becoming determined to make college something that I don't have to push debt either on you or me for the rest of our lives, staying away from drugs and alcohol, not acting like a complete dick to my parents for the past 17 years, not deliberately trying the make trouble, and not sneaking out, among other things, you are delusional.

As a leader of anything I can imagine you don't think about what exactly your consequences are that your actions bestow on the world, but I hope you can imagine that when I leave - and I will leave – there won't be much coming back. Sure, my life was pretty fortunate but I don't want to come back to something that has a stick so far up its ass, one moment from the next is made quite unpredictable and, in fact, an insane. Why do you think Jon "went crazy"? I believe part of that answer is inscribed in what I've said already.

Is one who becomes decisive before the question is even brought up capable of making a fair decision? Does one even start to understand the question and all that it encompasses? Perhaps it is an effective parenting method, but I don't believe it. You say it teaches responsibility because “the world 'ain't' fair” but I say it teaches the inept abilities of the world we make to become less than an indiscriminate and indifferent method of oppressive control. You say it teaches the rules of the world we give power too but there is at least one difference between you and I: I will not give power to it.

You are parent and I am son but there is a question as to how long that title can be held over one before the power of that title is undermined by the actions of the parent and that connection – under the pressure of all the energy pushed upon if for years – snaps, finally and with a sense of relief and liberation – perhaps so forced with those feelings that the discord is held eternally.

Your friend, Alex