This is something I wrote as part of an invite to a political summit I am organizing in Provo from December 28th-30th. If you would like to attend, you can email me for an agenda at sanders.ashley@gmail.com.
As I traveled around on my Nader speaking tour this last month, I stayed with a dozen different friends. Every friend I visited wanted to have the same conversation. They were scared because they had entered the adult world of real jobs, real budget concerns, and real time constraints. They were worried that they would never find out what they really wanted to do, or, if they did find out, that they could never make it happen. They were worried that the restrictions and unimaginativeness and sheer drudgery of most organizations would suck their soul and keep them from being the person they wanted to be. They admitted they had a hard time standing up to the structures and managers of the status quo to demand what they really needed or what people in general really needed. They fretted that they were becoming slaves of a paycheck mentality, and that they were giving up their old ideals to be ‘practical’.
In short, they realized that they were becoming the people they said they would never be, and they realized that this transformation did not occur overnight. Adulthood was waging a much more subtle assault on their ideals than they had imagined. They admitted that they thought their moments of defiance would be just that-moments of principle against egregious or unethical requests made by sinister bosses with ominous agendas. Instead, they acknowledged that losing your soul was a very mundane process-that they were losing it in a thousand miniscule concessions, not to overtly unethical propositions Read the rest of this entry »
