gooo highschool!

its alright, we told you what to dream

for full effect, read this while listening to Welcome to the Machine by Pink Floyd.

You'll go in soon, and I want to tell you so you wont be surprised.

They'll first strip you of your clothes, but they'll go deeper than that. They'll shuck off any little dignity you have-- you'll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and to be let alone to live. They'll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you'll not be able to tell yourself from the others. You cant even wear a scrap or pin a note on your breast to say 'this is me, separate from the rest'. After a while, you'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others cant say. And you'll do things because the others do them. You'll feel the danger in any difference whatsoever-- a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men.

Once in a while, there is a man who wont do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They'll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you cant finally give in, they'll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside-- neither part of themselves nor yet free.

Its better to fall in with them. They do it only to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army cant allow a question to weaken it.

- John Steinbeck

i wonder who "they" is, and i wonder if this fear is of a tangible threat, or merely a disquiet, unsatisfied regiment within oneself that they pose as an external threat.