YOUNG AGAIN? NO FRIGGIN' WAY!! | 2007-03-14
I forget exactly who, besides Pain, the brats... sorry, I mean, who the young people are here. But Pain is my star young pupil, so this is addressed to him.
First of all, don't believe old people who tell you they wish they were young again. THEY may wish it, but YOU won't. To a young, creative, feeling person, youth is a curse. Let's start with your feel for reality.
When I was a lot younger than anybody here, in my teens, I was cursed with common sense and the ability to COUNT. So, for example, when someone said to me in the 1950s – yes, Kennedy did not invent it – that "We are a nation of immigrants" – the arithmetic immediately sprang to my mind.
I would explain that, according to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, 1776, America's population doubled naturally every twenty to twenty-five years. So a thousand people who got here by 1650 would be a million by the time the Ellis Island flood began.
I told people that fifty years ago. But fifty years ago I was preparing for my sixteenth birthday, as I am now preparing for my 66th. Ten years later, "a nation of immigrants" was the national motto.
What about the sixteen year old who explained arithmetic to them?
"Smart kid."
But ignored. I was told that MY country, the one my people had conquered and held for three and a half centuries, belonged to Ellis Island and the brown America beyond. So Pain must explain this to others. And Pain must listen to the insanity no one with a brain could possibly believe. Pain must get used to the idea that selling out everything he loves is High Morality, the very essence of Self-Denial from the people who call themselves Christians.
Do I envy Pain his youth?
Oddly enough. I don't.