Nice to meet you fine people.

 

 

 Growing up in suburban America isn't easy.  Not because it is a dangerous place to live, but because suburbia respects and encourages a content state of mind, usually in the form of comfort.  One may live their entire natural life in the suburbs without questioning a single thing.  The mind is at ease.  This type of environment breeds pseudo-intellectualism.  One is never challenged, if he/she ever is challenged, it's at the little league park or with neighborly bickering of "whom should host the block party" this year or "whom should collect funds for the Christmas illuminati event."  Suburbanites never use the word "whom" though, in our town, the Philadelphia accent often washed out proper pronunciation of words.  

 

 

I could have been a baseball player.  My dad, a union leader, encouraged me to stick with baseball because I played it so well.  Only one thing stopped me from pursuing  a baseball career: I disliked sports.  I wanted to be intellectually challenged.  I was tired of people calling me a great "all around player" and being discouraged from acting on my own will.  Whatever the coach wanted from our team, the players had to do it.  That kind of surrounding, coupled with the nausea of suburbia, would have been the birth of another Joe-the plumber from "insert town here," America.

I thank punk rock and my own intellectual curiosity for my transition from a typical suburbanite to a man who questioned everything presented to him.  My first big question centered around the existence of God.  From an early age, I was frightened of the afterlife.  Although my family wasn't religious, they did believe in some form of God, and that vague paranoia passed onto me at an early age.  I always wondered, "When I die, an eternal life awaits me, and my Creator will judge the actions I performed on Earth."  I was more afraid of the idea of an eternal life than having to explain my Earthly actions to Him.  I find comfort knowing there is an end to the pain that is life.  Nothing frightened me more than knowing another life awaited me.  What if i didn't want another life?  What if I hated it?  I couldn't kill myself.  I was already dead.

So I challenged the fear of afterlife and looked for a better way.  Originally, i thought I was alone on this idea, to assume there would be another belief, another way, seemed so far fetched.  But after researching, I found that there were many people in the world who felt the same way.  It wasn't limited to punk rock, whom I felt expressed the anger of society better than anyone else, but dissident figures were on television as well: George Carlin, Bill Hicks, etc.  I consider those people/musicians inspiring.  It was only a matter of time before I found out about the heavy hitters in the world of science and elsewhere that could materialize what I had been questioning for so long: Is there even a God?  Carl Sagan helped me through it.

After initially questioning the existence of God, I started questioning everything.  I witnessed my own metamorphosis while up against the impossible odds in an environment known for pseudo-intellectual thought.  

I am now a student studying Journalism and am wondering why my liberal peers are so happy with Mr. Obama when he isn't going to further the liberal agenda but simply do what every Democrat does which is cater to the center.  

Anyway, i'm happy to find people who are willing to challenge something so wildly accepted as fact.  Nice to meet you fine people.

-Damon Fillman

Damon Fillman wrote:

 Why must medocrity be the new pragmatism? 

Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything new to this.  I love the Greens, but how much change have they really caused in this country?  While you work towards the world as how you think it should be you do still have to deal with the world as it exists now.  You take what you can get while not forgetting where you want to end up eventually.  I think that's the way it has always been.

Maybe I'm just too much of a dreamer?