When I talk about being an individual, I am not talking about the rhetoric of going against Christianity, organized religion, or subscribing to conspiracy theories.  This is the type of rhetoric that so called “leaders” or wanna be “independent thinkers” will try to sell you onto.  Often, in following conspiracy theories and failing to do your own homework, you are just as much of a follower as those that feed into the rhetoric being propagated through the mainstream media.  One must study for themselves and come to their own conclusions instead of blindly following another man, regardless of how seductive that man’s arguments may be and believe me, there are some very convincing and seductive arguments out there in this day and age.

Individuals get you to follow them through manipulating your emotions, which can then control your thoughts and cause you to buy into something out of fear.  Let’s say your weakness is a penchant for fashion, say you are what they call a shopaholic.  Behind the craziness is an adrenaline rush that comes from handling a new item (or just something different that is new to you), looking better than everyone else in the room, and a fear of having to do without.  The worst fear of a shopaholic or someone that is fashion obsessed is that they will have to go without one day and be rejected by society as some mythical outcast.

It never happens.  Instead they never go without because their mind continues to find creative ways to get more with less.  That fear has inspired teenagers to kill each other for a pair of Jordans or adolescents to make fun of each other and denigrate each other to make themselves feel better and to take the heat off of their own inadequacies.  You can literally feel like you are completely naked going out in a “pedestrian” manner, it is truly sickening.

Everyone talks about leadership but in reality this often means playing on each others fears and desires and rarely doing anything constructive to help anyone out.  You may come up to me and say that you are going to college, and I could feed you a line of bull talking about my own experiences with college and that you are just being trained to be a good employee and never be rich.  Not that it is not true, but it is not necessarily relevant to your objectives for going to school.

If you want stability there is no better way to do so in this environment than by educating yourself.  Particularly considering that a college degree can help you make more than $15 an hour.  You may not even want to be rich, but I brought it up to convince you to think about it and put it in perspective with your goals.  See that is what people that like to act like they are leaders do; act as if they are true individuals and have all of the answers.  Well if they have the answers why can’t they help you to get to their level?

In fact, if you have all of the answers it shouldn’t concern you if I were to get to your level or not because clearly, with your answers, you can always get further than I have.  It’s like if you ask me about a business opportunity that has presented itself to you and I tell you not to spend any money.  Well you never asked me for any money; am I upset because you have the money to spend on it and my own affairs are not in order, what am I really saying?

These are the same clowns in the African-American community that like to talk trash about the opposite sex that are coming completely out of nowhere with their rhetoric.  No one had ever asked them what their opinions on the opposite sex are, but they engage in this psychological warfare to create division and find a way to enrich their own coffers and stay relevant.  Your entire career is built off of talking about the opposite sex; what experience do you have, how well are your own relationships before you tell me anything about something you have obviously failed at.

This is how things go in our community; come out of nowhere with some rhetoric to differentiate yourself from everyone else.  If you’re really good at perhaps you can make a nice living, that is just the way that it is.  Those who didn’t make it have a million excuses as to why this never happened.  We learn this as a child, if you can’t hold your own people will steal your lunch, figuratively and realistically, so you must find a way to stand out.

Then we tell that lie that we do not need our institutions anymore, that they are all irrelevant and we can just assimilate into the mainstream.  Ironic considering that everyone else still has their institutions intact, and aren’t considering giving those up any time soon.  No, people want you to give up your institutions, practices, and culture, so they can create confusion and divide you and pit you against each other.  One can only take a look at what happened to the few institutions that we did have that were sold out to larger, mainstream corporations to see what happens.

I don’t expect anyone to be an individual in adolescence, though that is a good place to start. It is becoming harder and harder to stand out and be your own person.  You have the onslaught of the media, which has always been there, but has gone to new lows with the proliferation of the Internet.  It amuses me to see companies that have clearly, hired apologists in the way of writers that initially appeared disconnected from any corporate interests take to social networking sites or writing sites creating articles to further their agenda.  They fail as copywriters, but they are good enough to spread the rhetoric of the organization in blogs or on Facebook and Twitter.

Have you ever had someone speak out against the mainstream on one hand just to push someone else that is just as much a part of that mainstream on the other hand?  The media plays this game with us everyday, comparing apples to oranges when they are part of the same mediocrity.  One just appears to be a little enlightened, but at the end of the day, both are out to make as much money as possible.

There are perilous times; a lot of you talk a good game, but if push came to shove, and everything was under a single umbrella, as pundits often say that day is going to come, you would just fall into line with everyone else.  If you can’t stand on your own two feet now and need acceptance, what makes you think that you ever would in the future?

Listen please stop talking about skinny jeans, or lumberjack shirts, Pendleton, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Vans, or any other nuances from the ivory towers of fashion they would like the masses to follow.  Then they try to make it seem as though this was the idea of the people and that these looks came from the streets, such a sad myth indeed.  See, people are so leery of the large corporations and so quick to gravitate towards what they think are the streets they would rather accept some Hollywood idealized myth of what the streets are like that they can conveniently enjoy in their suburban homes.  Men are so focused on what is “gay” they are failing to recognize their own femininity; it is sickening.  Men preoccupied with ideas about femininity are more feminine than men that are comfortable in their own skin and free to wear anything this is how it really is and always will be.

If you wonder why I am this way part of it is because I live in a region dominated by Macy’s and WalMart where the majority of the jobs are with the military.  Small businesses are trampled and walked over by consumers looking for stuff that is not all that great.  Coming from a town that had their own local department store where large corporate entries like the aforementioned were far and few between it interests me.  You ever notice how they talk about the fact that Detroit does not have a national grocery store in the city limits as a bad thing?  That may have went over a lot of people’s heads, but cities like New York are not reliant upon national grocery stores either.  In fact if you really want to experience New York, you need to appreciate it for what it is worth, as opposed to looking for larger versions of what you have at home.

American cities and towns used to be known for that individuality that New York once stood for.  That stands in the face of business expansion, which is why corporations like WalMart fight as hard as they do to open stores in cities like New York or Chicago.  They would like nothing more, than to replace the local shopping scene with their homogenized scene, strip the place of its culture and take over.  The stores should remain at the edge of town in suburbia, and should not be allowed in the city core at all.

When you are assaulted with the same five songs on the radio all day, and the same mindless television shows on the networks and cable, what else are you going to do but to follow in the path of everyone else?  When people see you doing your own thing, and I do mean see you, not hear you talking about it, and you have your stuff together they will come to you on their own to try to figure out what it is that you are doing.

It would be easy to sit here and try to encourage you to buy this or sell you onto the latest “that”.  Clearly, there is a lot of money in doing so, and a lot of writers are out there trying to find more subtle and inconspicuous ways of doing so. A lot of us are in the habit of making people feel good; we can’t do so in face to face situations because we’re shy but we can do so with the words we write.  Test out the theories that people come to you with, ask yourself if people are really looking out for your best interests and realize that no one can ever see it exactly the way that you do.  No one is supposed to understand and believe in your dreams the way that you do …