For the past two years or so it has become "cool" and "acceptable" to dress/label yourself "PUNK". This of course, was disturbing and annoying in itself, but when compared to what's happening around me today, I would much rather be surrounded by these "fake punks" who actually at least pretended to hold common interests, or pretended they were able to hold a intelligent conversation...
I know what you're thinking, what could be worse than that? No, it's not goths still wearing black in 2002 when they seem to have run out of angst 6 or 7 years ago; no, it's not the annoying "trendy" emo kids of today; and no it isn't the people that think if they wear skater clothes like HURLEY, that they will be looked upon as punk... it's much much worse...
HIPPIES!
First of all, an explanation: Why do I hate hippies? Well, I guess I don't HATE hippies, I am just annoyed by them to a maximum extent.
HIPPIES ARE NOTHING MORE THAN LAZY ACTIVISTS! They never stop complaining about government and society and how fucked up and wrong they are, and so on and so on... And it's not their complaining in itself that gets to me. Complaining about government and society is probably what I spend 80% of my life doing, so no, it isn't the complaining in itself that bugs me... It's the fact that these hippies have oh so many gripes about the world, BUT ALL THEY SEEM TO DO ABOUT IT IS SIT BACK, SMOKE POT, GET HIGH and say dumb shit that makes no sense. I don't hear these hippies coming up with any sollutions for correcting the problems they see in society... And hippies never seem to protest anymore with the exception of old-school hippies; the "new" hippies don't do shit about anything. They don't vote. They don't argue their points, and they don't have any ideas for the "way things should be". They are nothing but good-for-nothing, annoying, lazy, unmotivated activists who can't even explain what their angst is against society, because they don't even remember what they're supposed to stand for.
Now that I've explained my loathe for hippies, I'll tell you more about how they are invading my high school. These invaders are not new people... they are merely mutated forms of those same kids who claimed to be punk when it was cool, and probably claimed to be goth or grundge when it was cool, too...
You know the type I'm speaking of... they find any excuse to be labeled an "outcast", they bathe in the joy of having something to be "depressed" about, and they beg for attention in all the wrong ways, by following something that they don't know anything about.
Yeah, well, these kids have decided to become "hippies". And they go all out. They dred their hair, they wear tie dye, they talk about love and peace and shit like that, and they have hemp necklaces the thickness of fisherman rope around their neck to show how "hippie" they really are! I guess you could call them... haha... hippie poseurs. I didn't think this could happen. Why would anyone WANT to be a hippie?
And these kids have crowded the hallway where I sit at lunch, away from the cafeteria, but not because I think that my alienation makes me an "outcast"... not because i think being an outcast is COOL... but because I get serious social anxiety in the cafeteria and I sometimes get dizzy and pass out. So I sit in this hall.
The hall used to be the home to some respectable kids that listened to punk music and followed punk beliefs, and it also house a few ska kids here and there. There were also the "cool punks", they sat down there too and called the people who sat in the cafeteria "the normals" because they thought this would make them seem even outcasted(which to them was cool)
But, even with these annoying fakes in the hallway, it was still a place that tended to bring out the best of my beliefs and it was a place where I sometimes could feel the warmth of being comfortable with this group of people who all wanted to make a change. It's hard to describe the minor euphoria the hallway brought and still sometimes brings to me, I guess the plainest way of saying it is that I've had some incredible memories in that hall. I'm a junior, and I've sat there since freshman year, with some of the juniors at the time, who grew up and graduated last year. These kids contributed to who I am today, taking me under their wing as a freshman and showing me a whole new world I'd never dreamed of: a world of being accepted even though you weren't "popular". I'm not saying I was introduced to punk by them, because I've loved punk music since I was in sixth grade, but these kids from that hallway furthered my progress in finding myself. I guess that's why I hold such sentiment for that hallway, that's why I take its corruption so seriously.
The culprit of this corruption are the hippies. Well, I wouldn't even consider them hippies, I'd consider them "wanna-be hippies". They don't really know why they act, dress and speak the way they do, but they know it's "cool" so they smoke their pot and develop their hippie identities. If you don't know any of the sort, consider yourself lucky; if there's one thing worse than hippies, it is people who want to be hippies. Hippie poseurs. *vomits*
Hippie poseurs evolved from trendy punks. All they did was prove all of my criticisms right. They weren't in the business of holding true to their ideals for the long run, they were in the stock market of "posing to be accepted" and the demmanded image for this market changes every few years or so. Well, I guess it was that time because they've evolved in to a subculture of poseur hippies.
They run around the hallway, talking only about pot, and telling everyone they love them and giving out free hugs. Well, I'd pay them to leave me the fuck alone. Not that I don't enjoy a good hug, I just don't want one from a dirty poseur hippie person... They smell so bad. Worse than any "gutter punk" I've encountered at a show. Because "gutter punks" tend to smell like booze, hippies (even the wannabes) just smell like dirty asshole. They need to wash their fucking hair. Dredlocks are such the trend, don't they see this. Nope.
One of them, who had dredlocks was going around telling everyone to vote her for "class individual". Fuck that. I see no individuality. An individual is someone who does what they like, for themselves, and doesn't give a shit what other people think. She obviously was not this, because if she didn't care what other people think she wouldn't be running around trying to get nominated class individual -- and in turn "prove herself" a labeled INDIVIDUAL for all to see. She cared what they thought. She begged for them to notice her.
So, these hippies preach peace and love, but when I argue with some of the dumb things they say they look away, with that spaced out "i wanna look like im stoned" look, and totally end the conversation. These hippies turned the hallway into a drivethrough pot distribution. One of them drew a potleaf on the wall and wrote "legalize it". I wanted to ask him if he knew how bad pot was for teenagers motivation, or if he would care if his kids smoked pot when he was a parent... but I didn't even bother. It would be like talking to the wall that he doodled on. The wall of the hallway that once stood for something more than a drug liberation headquarters... "I cannot help but hold onto a handful of times when what was spoken was a revolution in itself, and what we were doing was the only thing that mattered." (Against Me!)
Thus concludes my rant about the wannabe hippies, but it does not end my rant about the hallway's sacredness and how abandoned the punk scene has gotten... how the magic seems to have been lost.
After the whole hippie cross over, I realized something. The majority of the scene that still went to high school had consisted of those "cool punks". It made me see that a lot more people than I imagined never really cared about the cause, but only about the glamour. And it also left me very lonely in my world of still believing with all my heart in what I have believed in for quite some time, alone listening to my punk music that seems to have been recently labelled GARBAGE by the hippies and the emo kids, but they're another story. Has everyone lost grasp of their roots, or where they came from, of what they once believed in?
I relate to the following Against Me! lyrics for Jordan's First Choice:
Tell me how could you compromise yourself like this. How can you blame anyone else when you aren’t really committed. Where was your head when you broke that promise to yourself, the one where you don’t forget every life lesson that happened before your eyes. So you don’t wake up to regret she’s gone years away. You had hopes and dreams of a day where everything would come together. You wouldn’t have to be so scared. Are we just working until a day we decide we’ve had enough? All along we were strong enough to be sick of it. Put them all back in their fucking place. We were never in this together. The reality that you know is just behind your idea of a society, security and self. Am I just fucked up cause I can’t remember the last time any of this made sense, the last time I could stand up to myself. Street faces all blend into one, they ask for spare change. Am I forgetting what it looks like from the other side, have I forgotten where I’ve come from?Tell me how could you compromise yourself like this. How can you blame anyone else when you aren’t really committed. Where was your head when you broke that promise to yourself, the one where you don’t forget every life lesson that happened before your eyes. So you don’t wake up to regret she’s gone years away. You had hopes and dreams of a day where everything would come together. You wouldn’t have to be so scared. Are we just working until a day we decide we’ve had enough? All along we were strong enough to be sick of it. Put them all back in their fucking place. We were never in this together. The reality that you know is just behind your idea of a society, security and self. Am I just fucked up cause I can’t remember the last time any of this made sense, the last time I could stand up to myself. Street faces all blend into one, they ask for spare change. Am I forgetting what it looks like from the other side, have I forgotten where I’ve come from?
But I won't lose faith. I know where my beliefs are, and they are supported by a sturdy foundation whether I am the only one left or not.
The positive thing that I've gotten out of this whole fiasco is the overwhelming feeling that I have endured an obsticle in my life, the feeling that I have in fact found myself, and this time I am sure of who I am. I may not be able to predict the future, but no matter what happens, I will still believe in solidarity, it is who I am now, and seeing how easily others have cracked and given up on "punk" makes me feel like a stronger and more dedicated person, a person who represents a cause and knows exactly what she's about... a person who doesn't need their beliefs to be accepted by others to follow them.
Once again, Against Me! illustrates my feelings of achievment: We’re all presidents, we’re all congressmen, we’re all cops in waiting. We are the workers of the world. There is the elite and the dispossessed. It’s only about survival. Who has the skill to play the game for what it’s worth, and reach an obscure kind of perfection. Let’s try and keep as much emotion out of this as possible. Let’s try not to remember any names. We’ll do it for a country, for a people, for a moral vision. United we’ll make them remember our history. Or how we’d like to be told. How we like to be told. We rock (as in the act of, not the state of being) because it’s us against them we found our own reasons to sing, and it’s so much less confusing when lines are drawn like that. When people are either consumers or revolutionaries, enemies or friends. Hanging onto the fringes of the cogs in the system. It’s just about knowing where everyone stands. All of a sudden, people start talking about guns, talking like they’re going to war. Cause they found something to die for. Start taking back what they stole, sure beats every other option. But does it make a difference how we get it? Well do you really fucking get it?
I know what you're thinking, what could be worse than that? No, it's not goths still wearing black in 2002 when they seem to have run out of angst 6 or 7 years ago; no, it's not the annoying "trendy" emo kids of today; and no it isn't the people that think if they wear skater clothes like HURLEY, that they will be looked upon as punk... it's much much worse...
HIPPIES!
First of all, an explanation: Why do I hate hippies? Well, I guess I don't HATE hippies, I am just annoyed by them to a maximum extent.
HIPPIES ARE NOTHING MORE THAN LAZY ACTIVISTS! They never stop complaining about government and society and how fucked up and wrong they are, and so on and so on... And it's not their complaining in itself that gets to me. Complaining about government and society is probably what I spend 80% of my life doing, so no, it isn't the complaining in itself that bugs me... It's the fact that these hippies have oh so many gripes about the world, BUT ALL THEY SEEM TO DO ABOUT IT IS SIT BACK, SMOKE POT, GET HIGH and say dumb shit that makes no sense. I don't hear these hippies coming up with any sollutions for correcting the problems they see in society... And hippies never seem to protest anymore with the exception of old-school hippies; the "new" hippies don't do shit about anything. They don't vote. They don't argue their points, and they don't have any ideas for the "way things should be". They are nothing but good-for-nothing, annoying, lazy, unmotivated activists who can't even explain what their angst is against society, because they don't even remember what they're supposed to stand for.
Now that I've explained my loathe for hippies, I'll tell you more about how they are invading my high school. These invaders are not new people... they are merely mutated forms of those same kids who claimed to be punk when it was cool, and probably claimed to be goth or grundge when it was cool, too...
You know the type I'm speaking of... they find any excuse to be labeled an "outcast", they bathe in the joy of having something to be "depressed" about, and they beg for attention in all the wrong ways, by following something that they don't know anything about.
Yeah, well, these kids have decided to become "hippies". And they go all out. They dred their hair, they wear tie dye, they talk about love and peace and shit like that, and they have hemp necklaces the thickness of fisherman rope around their neck to show how "hippie" they really are! I guess you could call them... haha... hippie poseurs. I didn't think this could happen. Why would anyone WANT to be a hippie?
And these kids have crowded the hallway where I sit at lunch, away from the cafeteria, but not because I think that my alienation makes me an "outcast"... not because i think being an outcast is COOL... but because I get serious social anxiety in the cafeteria and I sometimes get dizzy and pass out. So I sit in this hall.
The hall used to be the home to some respectable kids that listened to punk music and followed punk beliefs, and it also house a few ska kids here and there. There were also the "cool punks", they sat down there too and called the people who sat in the cafeteria "the normals" because they thought this would make them seem even outcasted(which to them was cool)
But, even with these annoying fakes in the hallway, it was still a place that tended to bring out the best of my beliefs and it was a place where I sometimes could feel the warmth of being comfortable with this group of people who all wanted to make a change. It's hard to describe the minor euphoria the hallway brought and still sometimes brings to me, I guess the plainest way of saying it is that I've had some incredible memories in that hall. I'm a junior, and I've sat there since freshman year, with some of the juniors at the time, who grew up and graduated last year. These kids contributed to who I am today, taking me under their wing as a freshman and showing me a whole new world I'd never dreamed of: a world of being accepted even though you weren't "popular". I'm not saying I was introduced to punk by them, because I've loved punk music since I was in sixth grade, but these kids from that hallway furthered my progress in finding myself. I guess that's why I hold such sentiment for that hallway, that's why I take its corruption so seriously.
The culprit of this corruption are the hippies. Well, I wouldn't even consider them hippies, I'd consider them "wanna-be hippies". They don't really know why they act, dress and speak the way they do, but they know it's "cool" so they smoke their pot and develop their hippie identities. If you don't know any of the sort, consider yourself lucky; if there's one thing worse than hippies, it is people who want to be hippies. Hippie poseurs. *vomits*
Hippie poseurs evolved from trendy punks. All they did was prove all of my criticisms right. They weren't in the business of holding true to their ideals for the long run, they were in the stock market of "posing to be accepted" and the demmanded image for this market changes every few years or so. Well, I guess it was that time because they've evolved in to a subculture of poseur hippies.
They run around the hallway, talking only about pot, and telling everyone they love them and giving out free hugs. Well, I'd pay them to leave me the fuck alone. Not that I don't enjoy a good hug, I just don't want one from a dirty poseur hippie person... They smell so bad. Worse than any "gutter punk" I've encountered at a show. Because "gutter punks" tend to smell like booze, hippies (even the wannabes) just smell like dirty asshole. They need to wash their fucking hair. Dredlocks are such the trend, don't they see this. Nope.
One of them, who had dredlocks was going around telling everyone to vote her for "class individual". Fuck that. I see no individuality. An individual is someone who does what they like, for themselves, and doesn't give a shit what other people think. She obviously was not this, because if she didn't care what other people think she wouldn't be running around trying to get nominated class individual -- and in turn "prove herself" a labeled INDIVIDUAL for all to see. She cared what they thought. She begged for them to notice her.
So, these hippies preach peace and love, but when I argue with some of the dumb things they say they look away, with that spaced out "i wanna look like im stoned" look, and totally end the conversation. These hippies turned the hallway into a drivethrough pot distribution. One of them drew a potleaf on the wall and wrote "legalize it". I wanted to ask him if he knew how bad pot was for teenagers motivation, or if he would care if his kids smoked pot when he was a parent... but I didn't even bother. It would be like talking to the wall that he doodled on. The wall of the hallway that once stood for something more than a drug liberation headquarters... "I cannot help but hold onto a handful of times when what was spoken was a revolution in itself, and what we were doing was the only thing that mattered." (Against Me!)
Thus concludes my rant about the wannabe hippies, but it does not end my rant about the hallway's sacredness and how abandoned the punk scene has gotten... how the magic seems to have been lost.
After the whole hippie cross over, I realized something. The majority of the scene that still went to high school had consisted of those "cool punks". It made me see that a lot more people than I imagined never really cared about the cause, but only about the glamour. And it also left me very lonely in my world of still believing with all my heart in what I have believed in for quite some time, alone listening to my punk music that seems to have been recently labelled GARBAGE by the hippies and the emo kids, but they're another story. Has everyone lost grasp of their roots, or where they came from, of what they once believed in?
I relate to the following Against Me! lyrics for Jordan's First Choice:
Tell me how could you compromise yourself like this. How can you blame anyone else when you aren’t really committed. Where was your head when you broke that promise to yourself, the one where you don’t forget every life lesson that happened before your eyes. So you don’t wake up to regret she’s gone years away. You had hopes and dreams of a day where everything would come together. You wouldn’t have to be so scared. Are we just working until a day we decide we’ve had enough? All along we were strong enough to be sick of it. Put them all back in their fucking place. We were never in this together. The reality that you know is just behind your idea of a society, security and self. Am I just fucked up cause I can’t remember the last time any of this made sense, the last time I could stand up to myself. Street faces all blend into one, they ask for spare change. Am I forgetting what it looks like from the other side, have I forgotten where I’ve come from?Tell me how could you compromise yourself like this. How can you blame anyone else when you aren’t really committed. Where was your head when you broke that promise to yourself, the one where you don’t forget every life lesson that happened before your eyes. So you don’t wake up to regret she’s gone years away. You had hopes and dreams of a day where everything would come together. You wouldn’t have to be so scared. Are we just working until a day we decide we’ve had enough? All along we were strong enough to be sick of it. Put them all back in their fucking place. We were never in this together. The reality that you know is just behind your idea of a society, security and self. Am I just fucked up cause I can’t remember the last time any of this made sense, the last time I could stand up to myself. Street faces all blend into one, they ask for spare change. Am I forgetting what it looks like from the other side, have I forgotten where I’ve come from?
But I won't lose faith. I know where my beliefs are, and they are supported by a sturdy foundation whether I am the only one left or not.
The positive thing that I've gotten out of this whole fiasco is the overwhelming feeling that I have endured an obsticle in my life, the feeling that I have in fact found myself, and this time I am sure of who I am. I may not be able to predict the future, but no matter what happens, I will still believe in solidarity, it is who I am now, and seeing how easily others have cracked and given up on "punk" makes me feel like a stronger and more dedicated person, a person who represents a cause and knows exactly what she's about... a person who doesn't need their beliefs to be accepted by others to follow them.
Once again, Against Me! illustrates my feelings of achievment: We’re all presidents, we’re all congressmen, we’re all cops in waiting. We are the workers of the world. There is the elite and the dispossessed. It’s only about survival. Who has the skill to play the game for what it’s worth, and reach an obscure kind of perfection. Let’s try and keep as much emotion out of this as possible. Let’s try not to remember any names. We’ll do it for a country, for a people, for a moral vision. United we’ll make them remember our history. Or how we’d like to be told. How we like to be told. We rock (as in the act of, not the state of being) because it’s us against them we found our own reasons to sing, and it’s so much less confusing when lines are drawn like that. When people are either consumers or revolutionaries, enemies or friends. Hanging onto the fringes of the cogs in the system. It’s just about knowing where everyone stands. All of a sudden, people start talking about guns, talking like they’re going to war. Cause they found something to die for. Start taking back what they stole, sure beats every other option. But does it make a difference how we get it? Well do you really fucking get it?
