quote

March 15th, 2010 by David Miller - monday morning tube

“I feel like we’re so limited by the context at which we look at life. The way we look at who we’re supposed to be and how we’re supposed to love… everything. I feel like that, in and of itself, is a project of a lifetime: the problem of how to break out of the limiting context that is imposed upon us by the educational system, by the church, by our parents… As a kid I rejected it without even thinking about it. Now that I’m a little older, I see how deeply destructive it really is. Even our concepts about romantic love, I think, are destructive; treating people as property is destructive; being jealous of other people is destructive. You know, being jealous is a perfectly natural thing to feel, so it’s not about suppressing jealousy, but learning to come to terms with it and to recognize its destructiveness and then to transform it.”

–Jeff Magnum in interview at pitchfork

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  • http://www.joshywashington.wordpress.com joshua johnson

    Folks have always tried to categorize me, you know box me up and say, yes well, problem solved. In school my category was DISTRACTING TO OTHER STUDENTS and UNFOCUSED and DISRUPTIVE…discipline, parent conferences, failing grades…they all seemed to be attempts to further prove that my labels were correct and I needed to be altered somehow.

    In 8th grade they pulled me out of gym to give me aptitude tests to help determine A: should they give me Riddlin, and B: do I require “special learning needs”. After 4 hours of puzzles, quizes, interviews, trivia, spacial tests, memory performance and yes, even a rorschach, it was determined that I was fine (except for a complete lack of mathematical understanding) and that I was functioning at a high school level in most areas. The instructors who expected to deduce that I needed a class for slow kids looked a little beside themselves when they were asking me if I was interested in skipping a grade.

    The point is, they were only interested in supporting the cage that they had built for me and every other student. They hadn’t considered another way of thinking about me, or themselves.

    Similar story with religion, I was devout, a youth pastor, but one day couldn’t read the words on the page without knowing in my heart of hearts that the whole business was divisive and counterproductive. Another cage: SAVED and UNSAVED

    And marriage, well…shiiiiit…!