Dystopia Now

They keep me working right up to curfew. Not like I can do anything about it.
I know I'm replaceable, and I need this job.

But now its after curfew.

So I leave my uniform on to walk home. The cops are supposedly less likely to hassle you if you're comin home from work.

Not that they ever don't hassle us. Guilty 'til proven innocent, that's us. They can tell just by lookin. We stand out.

So I take the backways, through alleys and avoiding street lights, even though I know there are cameras on every other wall, watching.

But for once I'm lucky, I make it back without getting picked up. There's no way my family and I can afford another fine, another court date for curfew violations. I'm so tired I fall asleep in my uniform.

The blare of the one of my alarms wakes me, the other spits out a radio broadcast. Some fat old elites talking about the problems "my kind" are causing society, how they need tougher laws to control us, punish us. I take a quick shower, trying to wash the stink of work out of my short hair. It used to be longer, but the new regs say no hair past the ears. I make sure to shave too. Facial hair is just asking for trouble. Put on a clean uniform, grab my gear and I.D. card, and head out.

I try to be first in line, sometimes they won't fuck with you if your cleaned up and courteous. I get through the metal detectors and the bag search, but then that guard who has it in for me hauls me aside for another pat down. He does this cause he doesn't like me, I'm not "model" enough apparently.

Plus it gives him a kick that every time he frisks me it fuels the rumor mill, makes me look "gay". That way I get my ass kicked without him ever lifting a finger. It pays off for him right away. As soon as he let's me through, the "trustees" in their matching jackets round on me, callin me a queer and a fag. "Having fun with your boyfriend, faggot?" barks the biggest of them, hypocritical gold cross glinting under his collar. I see the punch coming, and try to duck, only succeed in protecting my face, but his next shot hits me in the gut. I know better than to fight back. I'll get the blame, he'll get a stern lecture and a pat on the back when no ones looking.

He walks off, laughing and high-fivin. I catch my breath and limp down the hall. I sit down just as the doors lock. Try to listen to the droning "education", but I gotta pee, the shot to my gut must of loosened up the bladder. I'd ask for a pass, but I know this guy won't give me one. He'll make me wait. If I had a trustee's jacket, he'd let me out no prob. But I'm never getting one of those jackets. Not big enough, not rich enough, no chance to kiss all the important asses, no one on the outside important enough to pull for me.

So I hold it, teeth swimming 'til its time to go out to the exercise yard. Line up. Synchronised jumping jacks, push ups, the usual uniform shit. Then they decide that today we're gonna play football. Some of the muckitymucks are watching, they'll enjoy it. So its me and the other runts against the trustees, except for the two they stick on our side for shits and giggles. The other team wipes the field with us, throwing in punches and kicks and clothes lines, all part of the game. Then the showers, the two trustees stuck on our side beat the shit out of a guy one fourth their combined size for dropping a pass and "making them loose", while the rest of them call us faggots and threaten to kill us if we look at them.

Lunch is a paper plate of slop, eaten with a spork cause anything else would be a weapon, while people throw food and shout insults at each other in the echoing space. Four more hours of "education" and then its sneak back, avoid the trustees, avoid the gangs, grab an hour's sleep wishing I had a lock on my door.

Back to work, try to get the boss to let me leave a bit earlier, so I don't have to risk curfew. She sneers at me and tells me that if people like me knew how to do our jobs right, we wouldn't have to take so long. I wade through the steam and heat of the shift, watching trustees with skinny girls on their arms bum around, rich and pampered and more free than I'll ever be through the windows I have to clean every day.

Dinner is 15 minutes of "food" that tastes like recycled waste, eaten outside, by the waste bins, can't let me be seen eating, but can't eat inside, the heat and the smell and the noise is too much. And then it hits me. Something in me breaks. I throw down my half eaten shit and walk away.

I know I'll catch hell, there's no getting around that. I'll have my ass chewed out, privileges denied, lock-down, who knows what.

I don't care.

I want to die.

The endless cycle of it all. The humiliations, the pain, the pointlessness. Knowing that there isn't an end. I'm at the bottom now, and as far as any I can figure, nothing I can do will make it better. Hell, the everyone says its only going to get worse the older I get. And so far, the older I've got, the worse it is.

So I go and break into an arms locker.

It's easy. They're all over the place, and no one thinks anyone like me would ever have the balls to do it.

I load everything I can find. I'm gonna go down fighting. Better on my feet than on my knees, right?


God damn High School sucks.

Now, please, save your outraged diatribes about me "glorifying school shootings" or whatever. I'm simply trying to point out a simple, but somehow unspeakable fact of American life. Youth, as a class, is horribly oppressed. There are curfews(where you AND your parents get fined, but you get locked up for a bit to boot), mandatory sentences (no juries for juvies either, no peers, just a judge, often elected on a "get tough on crime" platform). No freedom of speech, assembly, not to mention the constant petty humiliations (school uniforms, see-through bags, pat-downs and strip searches), police harassment, the hypocrisy of popularity and the free-pass grants to those rich and well connected enough to get it.

'Cause High school is the glory days, the best days of your life, right?

Is it any wonder some crack? Pumped full of mis-prescribe psychotropics? Surrounded by a culture that glorifies and rewards violence? Being constantly told by the media that this hell you live in is in fact your glory days? That High school and college students live lives of glamor and sex and nice cars and the occasional dramatic murder to up the ratings?

Is it any fucking wonder that some of them just crack?

So stop pulling your hair, wringing your hands, and asking the same old questions, placing the blame on the same old boogie-men. Public education as an institution, draconian juvenile law, and a culture of violence that denounces the young while idolizing youth have reduced adolescence to a mandatory prison sentence. Guilty until proven innocent. Sentence, 4 years re-education plus the occasional beating.

And prisons breed violence. Prisons breed cruelty. Prisons breed death.

Wake the fuck up.