I wanted to write something stirring and positive. That is for others to do. All that came out of me was this sullen thing.


I was born into a privilege known to very few in this world, but to many in this room. I was given measureless opportunity without effort. Comforts of long showers, rotted food,
decades of school. The sickness of the world services me. I am as much a parasite as a host. My flesh is pockmarked by my own tongue. I am a fool to think that my valiant efforts
of nodding along; affirming someone’s comment, does little more than counteract my guilt and fear that one day I will be enslaved, and that I will have had a complacent hand to
play in it. The guilt and fear of knowing that long before I am overseen, as I turn a working eye away from the enslavement of my neighbors, I will have already been imprisoned.

I fear I cannot be incensed, merely squeezed in my culpability. I keep side-stepping the long road, hoping the validation bought by the thick tools of my self-righteousness
could build me a stay. And I am not wrong. I’m right to think that I can hide within. I have scraped with a fine-toothed comb through my personality, until it bled and dried;
its crusty vestiges becoming safe, its annals monosyllabic. I have dulled my wit, culled my will—laboriously, with my eye. And to my eye I have gifted a throbbing muscle, sucking
in the back of my socket. I have made my mind a stomach, and I have made the stomach deeper each day. It yawns, a pit, hungrily bored.

My grandfather was alive and every day I wrestle with the discipline it would take to emulate him. How hard you have to work, how impeccable you must be with your word, to be the
one called to fix things. To shine with focus. To resonate quietly with principal. To be right as rain and revere your own curious mind; love your own capable hands. His
prescient care has given me glamorous time. It has brought my father to me. It has lead to this cracking of my soul.

They are taking away the pride of our children. Their fight is and has always been in the developing brain. What was once the illicit power of literacy bought by those willing to
risk their lives, is now the joke, humming infinite in the cochlea of the very young. They want to teach that nature is disgusting, that nurture is worthless to satisfaction, that
consistency is key. Imagination must have form, relationships must bring gain, art must be valuable. They are attacking the ease of childhood. Choking the resources of the village
it takes, starving the wanting, damp hands with a mean look. The covetous glare of the elite, who claw for their own autonomy, who work people hard out of self hatred, harder
still to punish the impositions of class. Those impositions of struggle, sacrifice, humanity, raw anger. Things they could never feign to reach within their lifetimes.

I am young, so there is hope. There really could be a forced rudder movement, a beating back of waves; bracing, braving—bravery, but am I too much a citizen at my core? Solemn and
practiced. Too soft for Labrador, awkward at the Shannon Mouth.