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December 30, 2024
I’m going to end with a piece of advice for young people, a series of advice for young people. When you start giving advice to young people, you’re already old. “When I was your age, blah blah blah…”
Well, first enjoy your crises of gender, calendar, geography, class, and race. Enjoy it. Reality will come, it will confront you and with it will come desperation. It will take you that way until you can’t find a way out. And then you will have the option of turning in on yourself, locking yourself in, or choosing the emergency exit of suicide. Choose the most difficult option: organize your desperation. You will become desperate, if you are not already desperate. Look for others like you. Organize that desperation.
Maybe you will fail, but you will have the satisfaction of kicking the system in the balls. And that is exciting. Believe me, it’s an aphrodisiac. Don’t pay attention to the criticisms of your musical tastes if you like reggaeton, rap, hip hop or whatever is coming out next, because those who now preach to you that this is not music, it is useless. “The music that I lived in my time is better…” They forget that they received the same criticisms, with the same arguments when they wanted to go from bolero to rock or from keyboard to corridos. It’s not that this is bad. Those people who criticize you are old at heart and have lost the memory that this rebellion that you are facing with you, they had it and they raised it years ago, right?
Originality. The system pressures you to have an identity. Before, identity could be that you studied a career, you had a degree, and you gave lectures or participated in colloquia and all that. Now it’s how many followers you have. So there is a lot of pressure on that. You have to… now there is a career of influencers, and so the measure of identity is the number of followers you have. It’s really bad, a really bad pressure because it leads you to do anything so that they look at you. Even really suicidal, stupid things, because it’s not even for a reason or a desperation. It’s so that they see you. And then you go and take a photo, a selfie in front of an oncoming train that has no brakes.
They want to be original and they say, “No, well, I’m going to be bad,” they call themselves “haters”, odiadores, if I’m not mistaken. Go in bad into any social network and you’ll know that you’re not original at all. I mean, they’re everywhere against whatever appears. If you say, “I’m going to talk badly about this and that, I’m going to criticize this, that, that,” you’re not original at all.
Try to be a good person. There you will feel what loneliness is. There you will be alone.
If you understand this, welcome to the minority. Become one.
Pay attention to reality. Maybe you understand that it is possible to confront it, defeat it, and transform it. Yes, there are others, other women and men who are on your side. They are all different, but they have the same determination to say “No!” where the majority agrees.
I would recommend that you do not look for the majority, look for the minorities. Tomorrow will be birthed from there. Majorities are the alibi for crimes.
Look for someone who has the same desire to screw up, to break the mirror, which is not a mirror, but a deformation of reality.
Do not be afraid of making mistakes, you will do it anyway. You will fall on the bike. And it will hurt. And it will be because it will be on gravel. Gravel is life, it is reality. And learning to ride a bike is learning to live.
Don’t be afraid, don’t pay attention, because my last piece of advice is don’t pay attention to advice, much less to this advice that I am now giving you.
Thank you compañeros, compañeras, we invite you…
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From “The Watchtower: Signs for tomorrow” by Captain Insurgente Marcos
December 30, 2024