This is wonderful stuff dear. :) Obviously I'm fully on board with the thinking here, and feel it's the sort of message that our society could do a LOT better at putting in people's minds. I really like your writing style here too, it has this kind of casual, rough-around-the-edges yet very sharp honesty that cuts right to the heart of the matter. It makes me think of this song/speech/thing that maybe you know, was kinda popular when it came out back in '99. The 'Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen' thing. It's presented like a song and set to music, but is framed as about the most awesome graduation speech ever. It has that same kind of honest, down to Earth, really really awesome advice people need to hear. Really stays with me. So does this. :) You've done a neat thing here and I hope lotsa people read it. 'Cause they should.

Aw, I appreciate your thoughts, and thank you for reading. :)
And the writing was just like quick scraps, if I really wanted to influence minds I'd expand and simplify this and revise it like 35 times. And oh, that song. _X That song started off meh and made less and less sense to me, it sounds kinda propagandistic (and I'm afraid of when humans tell me in a mass medium what to do, ever since some eye-opening subversive arts I learned about....)

The sad thing is that this lil' text is another form of control, of telling people what to do. Hopefully they'll critically evaluate and extract the good pieces of this that work for them, and their mental state will change. I want them to change their minds more than to... follow along with what I say? I guess... hah cx also honest-sounding text and speech can be VERY propagandistic. Think of all the country music that exudes patriotic symbology, or presents certain social topics in conservative terms, and has the perfect extended family music video to go along with whatever the singer's on about. I LUUUURRRRVE country but it's sad that like the one 'last clean' genre of music (other than classical?) is being loaded with attitudes and images that are 'cool to believe in,' instead of ideas that artists want to pass on to other individuals.

In short, it bites that any entity can quietly hijack and subvert a person, medium, or popular thing to push to a end. And I'm devolving this into a commentary about subversive mediiaaaaaoifuirvclvpdaqitolcmxbankthshxmvfthsbbt *runs flailing, why does he have to remember all this from his art classes*

It's interesting how differently one thing can be interpreted by two people. I'm sorry to hear those are your thoughts on that song, and I didn't mean to associate those kinds of feelings with what you've done here. Both things spoke to me personally in a similar way that I felt was very positive and optimistic and encouraging of critical thinking and finding one's own way with confidence, not discouraging it and brainwashing with propaganda. It certainly is something to watch out for in today's world, after all it's very easy to blindly rally behind somebody saying something without thinking too hard about it, even if they're saying that you should think critically and not blindly rally behind people. And it feels like there are few enough voices encouraging that anyway.

Nah nah, don't feel bad. And you haven't associated those feelings with my writing! D: I have that graduation speech song on a CD, and after a few years of listening to it I was like... whut? I don't exactly think that... and then it went on from there. (But YES to the thing about reading beauty magazines will only make you feel ugly...) but I'm like... "whatchu mean I should go live in New York? And how will it make me hard? Is New York supposed to be sexy for me?? Huh??" ;p and then I was all 'this is kinda merf.' *put away*

But the whole point/lecture on propaganda, that's just my mind degenerating off topic, and not relating the negatives of propaganda to what Baz Luhrman was surely trying to honestly do for graduates in 1999, which was to really really set young people right on life... and I go eek at sunscreen, it makes sand cling to me and it comes off in the water and i get burned anyway. Xp.... x3 I mean, I don't mind Mr Luhrman at all for trying to set people on the right way in parts of life.

I shoulda just kept quiet while I was ahead....XD my bad dear.

Edit: If you keep asking, eventually I'll pull a James May and give you a lecture.