In order to get back to a proper understanding of my views on justice and situational ethics, I realized that I'm going to have to get back to my posting on my personal history. When I left off last time, I was attempting to construct a correlation between my personal history and developmental years and my cynical outlook on life.
Some introspective consideration of my status as an extrovert has lead me to believe that I have always been, at heart, an extrovert. Being an outgoing sort of chap, I was always running up to people and talking to them at the slightest provocation. But at some point, this trailed off. Further consideration has led me to believe that at some point I realized how silly and foolish I seemed to these older folks. It took some time, to be sure, but by the time I was entering Kindergarten I had already taken my leave of speaking to most adults and other children in favor of reading and keeping my thoughts to myself. Part of this may have been that I was always a strange child and something of a wool-gatherer and took verbal abuse for that or it might just have been that I was a bit advanced for the malicious and randomly abusive nature of young children. But whatever the case, I went through most of elementary school having those friends whom I had "accidentally" picked up along the way along with my books.
This notion of friends by accident made the move to New York simple in a lot of respects, especially in that I had never been all that close to most of my friends. I guess, in the way of elementary students, we had liked each other well enough but really lacked any understanding of the world. Thus, I had disposed of some friends and gained myself some free time to read and the two more or less cancelled each other out and left me feeling rather unbothered.
If you've never had the "wonderful" experience of public school, especially in those wonderful Junior High years, the only thing I can say is that... well... your skin isn't probably nearly as thick as mine became as a result of it. Before-hand, I was merely fairly certain that I hated people... afterwards it was like a religion to me. People became the most worthless, unreliable scum to walk the face of the earth. Some teachers were different, but I came to largely regard my peers as foolish ignoramuses whom I hated.
Let's not get this wrong, I had good times and good friends... but they were all of the age of development where they exhibited that occasional characteristic adolescent immature cruelty. And thus I had no reliable friends and trusted myself to nobody. Adults were a good deal more reliable, but I had faith that they were every bit as fallible.
Thus, it was after this incubation of disdain, loathing and cynicism for 4.5 years in New York that I returned to Ohio. I wish I could say that those were pleasant years... but they generally weren't. I counted few as my friend and I trusted fewer still. My books were my solace and my room was my respite. That sort of emptiness does all sorts of things to an individual's outlook on life and I'm still dealing with the aftermath and it's been nearly 7 years since I left New York.
So yeah... if I was to divide out my formative years, the period in New York gets a section all to itself and essentially this section is how everything went wrong. Don't worry... things try to fix themselves in the next section.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at February 3, 2004 09:10 PM | TrackBack