Wednesday, 26 December 2012

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping. (Anita Shreve, The Pilot's Wife)

So my family protected me. They took care of it. That was when I finally realized what it meant to govern ourselves.

Senior gave me the boat as a birthday present. He told me it was a small token to compensate me for my troubles. He apologized that I was unsafe in his house and promised that it would never happen again.

I named the boat Freedom.

Scotch didn’t come around much anymore and her friends had permanently moved on. There’s nothing like a murder to clear out a house. It was for the best because those hippies attracted a lot of attention from the police. My family did a lot that was outside of the law but they were quiet about it. They paid police when they needed to. They didn’t bother the general public. They operated as innocently as criminals could.

Hippies, however, have a different mandate. They want to change the world. They want peace and are willing to stir up as much unrest as required to achieve it. They want the law and the government to support their change so they argue and fight and challenge.

Gangsters merely operate in another realm. Agree to disagree, they politely tell the police.

It’s ironic really the way hippies want peace but gangsters achieve it. How does protesting, which is anything but peaceful, bring peace? Practice what you preach; that’s what I’d like to tell those hippies. That’s the only way they will get peace. Actually, if I was to be perfectly honest, I would have to admit that there will never be peace. My father loves peace. He loves the idea of it. He loves talking about it, singing about, he just loves it. Not me, I don’t think it’s healthy. Peace sounds a lot like communism to me. If you don’t have conflict then everyone is just blindly accepting commands somewhere. I think getting along is nice and I’m not a big fan of war, but peace just seems silly to me. Maybe I’ve just read a few too many autobiographies of insolent dictators and rebels.

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