The belief in University education is a heavy peice of machinery with the most loyal of cogs. I went through the rigourous experience of boarding school and my biggest motivation was that, "I´m going to get into a prestigious university, and I´m going to have fun and freedom!" And then I got a fat envelope with a congratulatory acceptance letter from NYU and a contract to sign that said I must pay back all $100,000, that I, as a seventeen year old kid, was going to borrow over the next four years. So, I proudly bolted myself into debt in exchange for four whole years of Enlightenment, a Golden Resume, and some weekend Decadence.

I tried my hand at it for two years and nixed the last two after too many infuriatingly pointless required courses, a stodgy genetically modified university meal program, and swimming- no- treading water in a dense foggy swamp of test taking, leather boot clad, flying pigs-- classmates.

 

When was I ever going to learn about and experience the things that were vital and mind opening? Instead of pursuing interests, I was given impersonal, uninspiring bullshit professors, the type that never learn your name and try to relate to their students with "Who´s vacationed in Italy? Isn´t it fabulous?" Instead of talking about the criminal legislation involved in the Iraq war, I was assigned to buy a 70 dollar opera ticket as a way of understanding world cultures. Courses like this were so saturated in the "pearls" of Western tradition- we rarely peaked out from under the veil of Glorious Capitalism or production based thinking. Whether it was a required dose of art history or environmental studies teaching us about "the realities of global warming," everything was set up for us to bow down to the great Western thinkers and hardly question the system we were born into. The point was just to understand the perscribed histories and facts, and spit it back out to earn a passing grade. Furthermore, this "academic practice" catered to cheating, plagairising students. In nearly every class I attended, there would be kids texting at their seats, pens idle on the desk during whole lectures. The texting did not cease during exams, especially in the science lectures where curroption zapped through the air from phone to phone. Where were the kids with passion and dedication? Where were the professors that wanted the next generation to change this f***ed up planet? Why was I rarely meeting kids that weren´t obsessed with being hip and successful? I felt as though I was reliving scenes from Night of the Living Dead, and everyone was showing up to class in a daze, and constantly fixing their ravenous hungers for parties, clothes, and social networking. I thought, I must get out of this NYU malarchy and find some freethinkers. So I applied for a few internships.

I went to work part time for an indie rock marketing company. Bad move. If the NYU kids were robots, than these people were surely their mechanics. It only took a few moments on the first day to understand that that industry is full of ingenuine, sheepish money men. They were directly communicating with and grooming my consumer classmates. So I quit, and got another internship at Vice´s VBS TV. Here I was working for the youthful, daring leaders of independent TV (or so I thought). They were sending reporters to Baghdad and Cuba! I was so excited. But when I got to work, I found out the network was funded by MTV and that the indie journalism was quickly being wittled away in place for "indie rock" and street fashion.

 

Everyone was so distracted with consumer culture and making money. When were we going to stop being cool and start radically addressing problems that the world was experiencing like a fatal cancer? I decided I had to f*** off from NYU and New York. I was getting hopeless and bored, and not to mention digging myself into a financial mess of college government granted loans. I needed a real education. I planned to start a new chapter in the fall volunteering at an orphanage in Gautamala for indegenous children. But that all changed in April 2007, when I decided to see what other young people were up to at a music festival in California. It was here that I met my wonderful partner Daley and decided to explore the Western states, boycotting exams back in New York. Then, I went to live in England with him after consciously flunking out of America´s number 1 dream school.  And now, Daley has sold his house inherited from his late father, and we are living in a camper van, determined to shine a glaring, unignorable spotlight on the contradications and injustices, and enslavment of First World civilization.

I am not sure my choices have been viewed as wise or practical, but that is because all of my classmates and friends have been fed and digested a preprogrammed, nonquestioning sense of "practicality." In their worlds, it is Practical to pay $100,000 plus worth of loaned money back to the government for four years of luxury dorms and dismal classroom experiences. It is also Practical to eat loads of genetically modified food and force fed, mass tortured chicken and cows. These youths dump their parents´and their own incomes into the latest, coolest trends, and enjoy spending their money on weekend trips to their friends´study abroad sites in Europe. They travel abroad to youth hostels full with other travelling students. When this sheltered demographic is feeling particulary intellectual or guilty, they might debate ancient philosophy or ethics. But that is as far as it goes. The rallying for justice, the urgency for revolution, is all but wasted on leather boots and cell phones. These people are going to reak the same havoc of their generations past because they are being groomed into their generations past. Their hobbies, their schedules, and rituals are all saturated in the crimes of the first world. Their Gap Tshirts were made by Indonesian factory workers- indentured servants to the white population´s shopping addiction. They all want the special degree for the special job for the security of continued luxury and entertainment. Their apples, their aspirations, and their parties are all part of the general scheme for mind control, that is orchestrated by the people at the top of the pyramid, the people we refer to as the Illuminati. They are a dead people, an uninformed species being controlled by the leaders of society, to continue the blood bath, the stifling of evolution, and to push away the hope of an equal and advanced future.