Newsflash: We're not all Beautiful People

The real question is who’s going to read any of this? Who really cares what I have to say? It’s the perpetual writer’s anxiety, that what he has to say is just drivel. That he’ll come across as an idiot. Or worse—boring. And the Web compounds the problem because the Web does seem to multiply exponentially the onslaught of self-indulgent people with their mean little lives that plague our lives. Do I really want to be a part of this? I mean, does anyone really give a shit that lately I start my morning by jumping into my white trash pickup, plugging Green Day in the CD player, bombing across the orchard with American Idiot full volume, then go careening around the back roads to the train station terrorizing the good people of Sherborn while screaming the lyrics along with Billie Joe Armstrong and playing air guitar as I head off to my job as a copywriter on the Buick account?

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Well, you’re still reading, so I guess that answers my question.

Does anyone really give a shit about what I have to say is a question that has plagued me my entire life, but that’s a blog for another time, isn’t it? Suffice to say for the 16 years I wrote newspaper columns every so often someone would write a letter to the editor either praising or vilifying me, or they’d take the time to pop me an email. Someone is reading this swill so I’ll do it for another day.

That said, I would never defend everyone’s right to voice his or her opinion. Somewhere along the line, I believe it was somewhere in the sixties, we got the notion that we were all Beautiful People. That we all have something to offer and that we’re all pretty inside. Newsflash: We’re not all Beautiful People and there are even some of us who are as cold and black and unfeeling as a lump of lead on the inside. There are loads of people, some of whom I know personally, who should never be allowed to open their mouths. Their opinions are based on prejudices, tight-fisted, cold-hearted morality, or just plain ignorance and the real sin of our nation is that these people actually are allowed to vote.

But of course, you and I know we’re not part of that group, right?