Saw Bowling For Columbine... no movie has ever made me laugh and cry to such extremes. Usually a movie is either really sad or really funny, rarely both. Though most of my activism these days is in anticonsumerist areas, it tied the whole culture of fear into it for me. In high school, I was in the trenchcoat mafia, and it was particularly painful to empathize with those guys at the same time that I was repulsed by their actions. I was called fag and picked on, I wore trenchcoats and combat boots, I had the Anarchist Cookbook*, I made bombs. I had fantasies of "showing them all". But I never reached that point where I crossed the line into harming another person, and I came through that time to the realization that the kids who were persecuting me had lives that were just as sucky and that high school is not one's entire life. Like Matt Stone (Columbine graduate & creator of South Park) said in the movie, "it's the dorks who go on to do incredible things. All the cool guys end up living in town and working as insurance salesmen."

Sigh... nowadays most of my angst is directed against my fellow progressives, who seem determined to drive people away from their cause... fortunately, hidden within large crowds of young people who are all talk no action and adopt progressive philosophies to allow themselves to feel superior to everyone else, there are individuals who are more interested in doing than talking about doing. It's hard to find them because they aren't present in forums of debate, they're out there doing it. You can always detect them because they encourage others to get involved rather than lording their activism over others as a demonstration of how cool they are.

It's odd, you know, moving to the city and discovering that counterculture in significant numbers becomes oppressively conformist... the uniform's different but it's a uniform just the same. Is it possible to be "counter-counter-culture" without being "culture"?

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*which, by the way, is inaccurate in many of its recipes and in its portrayal of anarchy... as violence is an inherent feature of capitalism, not anarchy.