Monday, February 09, 2004
I remember as a kid devouring a steady diet of gi joe. I almost cried on Christmas one year when I didn't get the gi joe figure I wanted. I really wanted Gung Ho. I really admired the fact that not only was he bald, but he had a tattoo on his chest. Rebelliousness within the context of authority.
It seemed like all the bad guys wore the most ridiculous outfits. Pants and suspenders and a cape, but not a shirt. Miscelleanous sports equipment, shocks of green hair, mismatched boots, a club with a spiky baseball attached to it for a weapon. Consequently the majority of the good guys wore pretty traditional/conservative military uniforms (except for chest tattoo guy, but his uniform was still mostly camouflage).
I hate to admit to it, but I divided my world up into good and bad along these lines. People in military uniforms; good, people in opposition to them not wearing uniforms; bad.
This led me to assume some rather unpopular, wait why use politeness, some rather stupid opinions on certain situations:
Tiananmen Square? Who had the tanks? Who had the uniforms? You can't be wrong if you're driving a tank (this I assume also held true for my opinion on the Gaza Strip). Damn the Students! They must have been doing something awful enough to deserve to be crushed by tanks. The brilliant logic of a ten year old.
Oka? I can remember driving in my parents' station wagon just outside Ontario wishing that the whole thing would just come to a quick conclusion. I remember wishing that the RCMP/army/proper authorities would just move in and set things right. They did move in and made a martyr out of a member of the Surete Quebec. Martyrs don't die for causes that aren't just, right? Of course not! This only strengthened my view that as long as you were wearing a uniform you were doing right (possibly this idea sprung from watching too many episodes of Duddley Do Right as a kid).
I'm pretty sure I held pretty tightly to these ideas of what's right and what's wrong up until I was about 17 or 18. In any sort of struggle between the police/government/military and others, I always sided with the side that represented what I assumed was right. If the police were mad I was mad. How could gi joe not be in the right? I didn't like anyone making a fuss and upsetting what I thought was the status quo. I'm sure in elementary school I tattled on anyone who disrupted the class, in fact I know I did this. It pissed me off that kids were eating hardened glue off their fingers and not paying attention. I didn't know why they were doing this and I didn't give a shit, I just knew that it was distracting and it was interupting things, so I did something about it. This played itself out in other areas of my life. I didn't take very favourable stances on homosexuals, natives, french separatists, etc. I remember at a debating tournament once, debating against schools segregated based on sex and saying that like in prisons, this would lead to increased homosexuality. I'm not sure if it was Public Enemy lyrics or not, but I once told a bi friend of mine, at 17, that homosexuality wasn't right, because the parts didn't fit. It wasn't because anything particularly bothered me, I wasn't repulsed by homosexuality, I just didn't like anyone, any group, upsetting the way things were.
It took a punch to the head by some native kids outside a school dance to knock these ideas out of my head. They didn't know who I was, they didn't know how I felt about anything, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When someone punches you in the head for no apparent reason and they seem pretty pissed, you start wondering why they may think you're an asshole.
You shouldn't have to get punched in the head in order to change your mind, but sometimes a fire lit under you isn't an entirely bad thing.
It seemed like all the bad guys wore the most ridiculous outfits. Pants and suspenders and a cape, but not a shirt. Miscelleanous sports equipment, shocks of green hair, mismatched boots, a club with a spiky baseball attached to it for a weapon. Consequently the majority of the good guys wore pretty traditional/conservative military uniforms (except for chest tattoo guy, but his uniform was still mostly camouflage).
I hate to admit to it, but I divided my world up into good and bad along these lines. People in military uniforms; good, people in opposition to them not wearing uniforms; bad.
This led me to assume some rather unpopular, wait why use politeness, some rather stupid opinions on certain situations:
Tiananmen Square? Who had the tanks? Who had the uniforms? You can't be wrong if you're driving a tank (this I assume also held true for my opinion on the Gaza Strip). Damn the Students! They must have been doing something awful enough to deserve to be crushed by tanks. The brilliant logic of a ten year old.
Oka? I can remember driving in my parents' station wagon just outside Ontario wishing that the whole thing would just come to a quick conclusion. I remember wishing that the RCMP/army/proper authorities would just move in and set things right. They did move in and made a martyr out of a member of the Surete Quebec. Martyrs don't die for causes that aren't just, right? Of course not! This only strengthened my view that as long as you were wearing a uniform you were doing right (possibly this idea sprung from watching too many episodes of Duddley Do Right as a kid).
I'm pretty sure I held pretty tightly to these ideas of what's right and what's wrong up until I was about 17 or 18. In any sort of struggle between the police/government/military and others, I always sided with the side that represented what I assumed was right. If the police were mad I was mad. How could gi joe not be in the right? I didn't like anyone making a fuss and upsetting what I thought was the status quo. I'm sure in elementary school I tattled on anyone who disrupted the class, in fact I know I did this. It pissed me off that kids were eating hardened glue off their fingers and not paying attention. I didn't know why they were doing this and I didn't give a shit, I just knew that it was distracting and it was interupting things, so I did something about it. This played itself out in other areas of my life. I didn't take very favourable stances on homosexuals, natives, french separatists, etc. I remember at a debating tournament once, debating against schools segregated based on sex and saying that like in prisons, this would lead to increased homosexuality. I'm not sure if it was Public Enemy lyrics or not, but I once told a bi friend of mine, at 17, that homosexuality wasn't right, because the parts didn't fit. It wasn't because anything particularly bothered me, I wasn't repulsed by homosexuality, I just didn't like anyone, any group, upsetting the way things were.
It took a punch to the head by some native kids outside a school dance to knock these ideas out of my head. They didn't know who I was, they didn't know how I felt about anything, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When someone punches you in the head for no apparent reason and they seem pretty pissed, you start wondering why they may think you're an asshole.
You shouldn't have to get punched in the head in order to change your mind, but sometimes a fire lit under you isn't an entirely bad thing.
# posted by Die Brucke @ 10:52 PM
