College dropout

I wrote that last post almost six years ago, at a time in my life when I had no focus, no goals, no home, no purpose. Just another hard-partying college kid with a dream of being a writer someday, taking full advantage of my newfound freedom to indulge in every hedonistic thrill know to man.

I went to college because it seemed like the right thing to do, because I was sick of hanging out in the town where I went to high school, working shitty food service jobs. I took a year off after graduating high school, worked construction out on the east coast and travelled around Europe for a while, ended up back in Boulder, CO with a burning thirst for new experience, new knowledge, new social interaction.  So I took off again and did the college thing for a couple years, but right around 9/11, something shifted.

Now I’ve always been a wee bit disenchanted with our country. Probably has something to do with the fact I read books instead of watching TV, but after 9/11,  after reading every newspaper, magazine and investigative report I could find, I was sickened by the misinformation and doublespeak. The vast majority of American media was not even asking questions of the government, but simply acting as a mouthpiece for their rhetoric of fear and racism. I was going to school for journalism and this is the career I had to look forward to? Copying a press report from the White House and calling it truth?

I pretty much dropped out right around then. Granted I was still attending classes (every once in a while), but my focus shifted to the world around me, the Orwellian shift taking place at the top levels of our government. Facism in action, disguised as a holy crusade in the name of democracy and justice. I started publishing my own newspaper on campus, focusing on things like the PATRIOT Act, the CIA/Bin Laden connection, the Carlyle group, the rhetoric against Iraq that was increasing on a daily basis as Afghanistan was bombed into even worse ruin than we left it in after the Cold War.

About a month before we started bombing  Iraq, I attended a protest in Colorado Springs and had my first taste of street action. Choking on tear gas waving a sign saying “bombing for peace is like fucking for chastity,” I finally felt that I was doing something to stand up to this vast system of greed and injustice. I dropped out of college a few months later and began a new life…

~ by drivelspin on May 6, 2008.