You wake up and smell the coffee. The aroma reminds you of the small pleasures of living in 21st century where you have these modern luxuries for almost nothing. You then remember that you are living in a capitalist society with systematic forms of oppression against people of color. Then you realize that those that hold privilege don’t actively support this but they are reaping the benefits of it from their ancestors. Then as you tell all this to your spouse they put their arm around you as if to affirm the idea that you are speaking madness and need to stop, that your thinking is an illness that needs to be cured. They say you’re crazy and that it’s “not all that serious.”
This isn’t something that has actually happened to me; well it has but not that exact scenario. There are times when I think a lot about something and give a really critical analytical response and I’m shutdown by peers. Not as if to say they think I’m wrong, they hate critical thinking, or they aren’t smart people, but that I myself have no chill. They may ask me, “Michael, where is the chill? Michael, I’m looking for the chill but I can’t find it” (something to that effect.)
I’ll be honest, I think a lot and my ideas usually outpace my own process of recognizing them. Probably because for the past three years I have been studying film and culture sprinkled in with all those philosophies that make you hate yourself and everything around you (I’m great at parties). With all these ways of thinking I know that someone else who thinks like that would probably be the absolute worst to befriend. Especially at the same youngness as me when there are egos clashing and petty differences become ideological attacks on one another. So I hang around people who aren’t like me, who aren’t always picking apart the reasons why McDonald’s is selling a Big Mac at $4 instead of $6.
Because being critical isn’t in, it’s not very sexy right now. It sort of is if you are with the right people but in a broader sense it’s annoying. What am I saying with my anecdotal story about the personal suffering of Michael’s mind? I am saying to think is to be annoying and hard to get along with. I love my friends and am grateful if they’ll still have me at their lame parties (I think the parties are lame, they’re not objectively lame).
