"We looked, as children, at how romantic concepts of faith,
family, and love manifested themselves in the lives of
grown-ups and saw a massive schism that our guides seemed
willing to overlook. Once our rebellion took root, we found
similar schisms between the world as presented and our
experience everywhere; unable to overlook them all or to
communicate adequately our revulsion at this fractured reality,
many of us became misanthropes or turned the anger inward
and self-destructed. Distrust was our constant companion as
puberty took hold. We knew we hat been lied by those responsible for our upbringing. If they weren't liars, the were crazy, and that
explanation for their delusions was no better.
Unable to believe that they believe, we had no choice but to
rebel. The literal dumb pleasures of the world would have to suffice.
So we danced on bars and threw our bodies into the pleasures of
the night as if they would save us, and for a limited time, they did.
Such distractions work well until they don't,
and that is the final disillusionment!
The lucky few developed a healthy 'fuck you' attitude toward
the fascism of received reality and set about living in a constructed,
conspicuously artificial world, in which the daily business of remaking
the world became a joyful way of life, in which the slippages between
'real worlds' became a source of endless fecundity rather than pain.
(Bill Arning)
