Discrimination At The Train Station: Social Injustice/Self Expression

The collision course, my friends, is the train of individual thoughts influencing social change, and the train of collective thought, void of individual awakenings which futilely attempts to remain the same. Our freedoms are bound in the ties of the track that once gave us the ability for perpetual motion. In moving down this track we once had the capacity for social as well as individual change.

Somewhere a collective group of individuals started charging more for the ride. Here, right now as I speak, a family sits at this train station, stagnent, with nowhere to go. In order to step foot upon the train that once carried them through life, they will have to pay in their own personal pride, and must compromise their belief system. They must get on the train not as engineers, but as passengers. It is too high of a cost, but they are running out of time.

Freedom has become a word that has become so overused we have somehow lost its definition. People are no longer able to express themselves in their true light. A great void in communication, compassion, and understanding is nestling its way into our society. If this void finds a home, it will surely swallow us whole.

I know a man who was terminated from employment without notice, because his eyebrow exposed a tiny piece of metal. No jewlery, an understandable request for some proffessions in this coorperate world. This means anything used to decorate one's body. It is understandable only to the extent to which it may cause interference and risk with production, or services. Why focus on only the eyebrow ring, when every piece of jewlery has the same potential risk? To request one not to wear jewlery fearing customer reaction is a failure to do marketing research. Anyone who turns from a business due to an eyebrow ring, has some serious evaluations to do, and my reccomendation is to look at the past, and open ones mind.

Did you think that the ways in which we self expressed ourselves would remain stagnent? If so why did chromagnum man survive the evolutionary change in human history. Self expression has a certain way of keeping us thinking. Our train of thought builds its own tracks. It is what advances us. If it bothers you that one has pierced his brow, then perhaps I should choose the uniform you wear tomorrow, as it is, soon we will be all forced to wear the same suit anyway.

A new discrimination has come to surface. Actually it is the same old discrimination resurfacing in a different corner. Those who express themselves through ritual body piercing, tattooing, or alternative hair styles or dress, tend to be looked at as less proffessional. Anyone who does not fit the criteria, that is not so clearly defined anymore, seems to violate the rules of business. It is only expected. We are a nation teaching our children that image is everything. Why?

Personal expression is found everywhere, those of us who tamper with the extreme, are really not being extreme, and are really no different than those of us who seek alternative methods of self expression. Normal is defined by what is socially acceptable. It is defined by the collective. Collective thought has allowed us to function as a whole, however it is indivdual thought that has allowed us to progress. Perhaps on the surface, piercings and tattoos are not considered to have the power to influence us to progress, and many may not see them as a means to progression. This is surface however, and a piece of a greater whole that may allow us to advance.

What is touched upon is our personal freedom. Self expression through alternative ways is simply a symbolic representation of this. Personal freedoms are violated every day. This however has been happening for years. With every group of individuals that follows the "rules", there shall be that group of individuals that breaks them, and pushes them further. For every man who has an idea, there is one who shall follow the blueprints.

I know a four year old girl who consistently seeks out her snow white costume, and her pretty wedding dress to wear out in the sun. The same little girl prefers to wear one sock, and jumpsuits that beautifully mismatch. She is allowed to do what she wishes, and choose her own clothing. She is her own, and at the precious age of four, her innocence reminds me she has hurt no one in her process to self express. She is not afraid to say how she feels, and her creativity seeps from her mouth and we listen, for her words are wise, and I wonder sometimes if even she understands what she utters under her breath.

Her father may have to painstakingly teach her to follow blueprints, for survival may depend on such. After all this was a man terminated for his own self expression. This is the man, although quickly employed again, that cannot seem to find housing for his children because he is judged upon first sight. A true musician, with a talent to play upon the strings of his own struggle to remind us of what freedom truly means, faces the path of destuction to his own ideas about the world. A true and loving father faces the destruction of the path he takes to encourage his children to be their own without hurting others; to be the flashlights in the dark world that surrounds them. What will he teach his children now?

Her mother has been taking care of the elderly for years now, witnessing first hand the change in our human history through the old tradition of oral storytelling. She has watched the decades pass in an old man's eyes and watched social stagnation trickle through the tears of old women on their death bed. Witnessing just how deep the depth of the human heart goes, she now cups compassion in her hands. Baring witness to her children now, she fears their opression knowing the history through the sacred stories she has been told fist hand. What will she teach her children of our nations history and of our nations future?

The little girl who was so liberated faces homelessness along with her two siblings. Her sister at age seven has been changed from school to school, and her intellegence yields to another dimension in self expression. Hiding in books about the universe she recites just how far we really are from the sun, and just how close we are to great void of space. She stares with me up at the weeping willow and asks why it is weeping. Her brother, age two is still exploring, he too has had many rooms to explore, and many places to call home. His tantrums only express the frustrations of early childhood tendancies, but they are a reminder of our own difficulties as well. We are all still learning. Some of us still have the urge to test our boundaries.

I am simply asking for people to think about this. Our blueprints for our train of thought are of short supply, and there seems to be too many dangerously looking to find more blueprints to follow. The four year old is simply designing new blueprints, even at the youthful age of four. The seven year old is simply reading them and interpreting them in a new way. The two year old is simply just beginning to discover his vast universe. What is frightening is that we bind our youth as well as our new generation of parents from self expression. To those who have the need to self express, they must be allowed this justice, especially if no one is being hurt in the process. Without this self expression, our youth, and their baring parents will surely be driven to push their boundaries in a way that will dangerously destroy others around them or themselves.

There is a man with an idea, waiting to be seen in the crowd. What better way to shine a light than to turn the flashlight on in the dark? What better way than to come out of our comelian states so that we do not blend in. What better way to express our ideas than to demand a focus.

I ask only that we allow one another to coexist in a perfect balance. The scales of justice mean more than we will ever know. It is one extreme to the other that gently rocks our scale, may we have the strength to persevere, so that one or the other may not fall from the scale and create injustice. May our personal freedoms be allowed to sway gently with the force of our social freedoms through patience compromise and open minds. May people realize that they have not the right to judge.

This is my voice. -soulsanction-

Sheperd Vs. Sheep: Personal Letter To Society/Government

This be the moment in time when I am at a loss for words. I cannot tellif I have moved forward or backward. I have bowed to your ways of conventional thinking, found myself working your labors in efforts to survive. Now our ships are sinking, and I, we, are barely alive. I was supposed to be in a country which only truly served to the hierarchies of freedom, but no freedom I gain in return. I must tell you how angry I am; I must tell you how this burns. It is time now to speak of these unfathomable misfortunes.

I have done as you have said, even still, and by binding every expanding surface of my true will. I have served you for many years now, hoping that somewhere, somehow, you will see me in your crowds. Am I speaking too loud? When everyone looks the same, I am unaware as to how. Maybe I should fall into a fit. Maybe I should swallow you. I am more apt to think I should spit.

I've decided to live outside of your archaic refuge, maybe then with the threat you will no longer refuse. I am broken and I have been blamed. Your clones continue to make me feel ashamed. I've needed shelter for a while now, and still I cannot lay my head down. I am lost in the maze of your mad men. Maybe I should start digging graves for your gladhands. I have one thing left you see.. it is called my individuality. I have taken the numbers off my name, just so I don't look the same. I have torn them too, off my shirts, and now I am building my personal temple from dirt. I have left behind your conventional closeminded thinking, and I am beginning to plug holes in the ships your sinking. There is something you must see, ah, yes I am burning the disease of your humanity. I have a wife, and a husband. I have children three. None are of my blood, but are part of me. All the same, I love them all incredibly.

These ways frighten you I see. I can see the glares, the "how could this be?"'s. Ah, but it is love that binds beyond this country's laws, for it is universal and beyond the stars. We show our children the compassionate hearts; teach them that true wordly love can never hold us apart. We show them that love always stays, no matter how close or how far away. They know a truth, and live by its name, but you are tryng to put numbers on their backs, and make them all the same.

The expression of our love is not bound by your rules at all, and it seems I have broken through your socialist walls. You are still lost in your mazes of monogomy, one to one, two but you cannot accept the three. I cannot fight what is natural for me, and I cannot help but think it's you who are crazy. Call me primordial you may, and perhaps you are correct, for I cannot expain.

You are the country whose foundation was built on freedom. A war was fought and many in between. I was fortunate not to have to see them. I have read your history books and all the wrongs we have done for such rights. Long after your wars, I am still forced to fight. While you sort for suitable cultures, instead, I embrace them all. While you stalk the dead like vultures, I sit and watch them fall. You rape all that is individual in me, and now you try to replace those beautiful ideas with ones that are archaic comfortable and old. You are embracing what is less compassionate in your coorprate 9-5 rush-hour and your hearts are self-righteously cold.

You fear more now than ever something is going to change. I am not afraid, I will seek an expanded range. Go ahead A to Z. I'm jumping from A to B to C, because I'm looking for what is in between. You keep your historical minds and swallow the mud of your mundane existence. We are beginning to crack; we are becoming crushed. We will not give up. These boulders of our foundation, are of our own creation, and they stand sturdy and steadfast on the top of your hills. They are kept from drifting down into your valleys by sheer solid will. So while you cannot fathom our beautiful face, we will kindly go at our own pace. While you cannot fathom anything beyond your streets, we shal move on, in our paths. We the sheperds, will be feeding you, the sheep.

written by Soul Sanction

A Bomb for a Bomb: Stepping Outside of War

I have to state that the facet I see upon this diamond of truth, is that whether we are American, Canadian, Mexican, whomever we are, we must realize that in a much larger scheme: we are all human. we all have a right to exist as we have deemed necessary to exist, have the right to believe what we believe. It is difficult, but who is really right, you feel it in your gut like the other so, but you have lived a different life, with different experiences. Who is really right, does it matter. Did it ever matter.

Tragedies occur, but a bomb for a bomb never solved anything, and after all said and done, never turned back time to resolve the tragedy, but leaned toward creating a devistating landslide of more. It just became another bomb, bigger and better bombs, bigger and better machines and technologies until finally we have moved away from the machine and used the machine as a mere vehicle for biologically engineered diseases.

Hate shall feed hate, until finally we have all lost the ability to see the compassion we once held, the forgiveness, the understanding that we all make mistakes, horrible and detrimental mistakes, but do we need to make more in our rash emotional retaliations until we are all destroyed. will it take the world to be infested in such a biological havock that our children will look like the very monsters from their story books. Tell your child that it is ok to kill a terrorist who has instilled fear through mechanisms of death and destuction, but that a bully can reckoned with in a different manner. To a child it is the same, a bully using fear to control, to get their lunch money. To us with adult minds and the ability to suddenlt measure things into a more catastrophic scale, it id different.. so xplain to your child why it is ok to kill one man, but not another. How the death penalty is not ok, but how it is ok in the name of war.