We Will be Free
by the YLF

Every business day we are violated, condemned, coerced, psychologically molested, and standardized to the point of misery between the hours 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m; We’ve been preparing for a life full of preparing for life. We are made to feel inferior and are forced through state-sanctioned means of coercion and degradation, to compete and test against one another, which divide us into classes we aren’t taught to comprehend. Like a hunter-gatherer thrust into a world of divided labor and complicated technology, we have been thrust from our world of play and fun into a world where suddenly things are about social darwinism and acquisition of material resources. We are the youth of the world. Each one of us bear witness to the divorce, addiction, violence, contempt and apathy our parents demonstrate. We’ve all seen someone we love crushed by debt or job-loss. We are unable to place significant value on passive instruction or following the trivial rules we had no part in creating and because of this we are considered defective. As these alleged faults develop, so do the pharmaceuticals. Happy children once full of joy and energy are manipulated into exoskeletons consuming dull monoculture and bland food composed of stimulants and addictive substances.

Some of us are beginning to catch on; we’ve rejected our die-cut roles and chiseled desires and begun the search for a self-actualized future. When schools demand we conduct mathematical wizardry and run a mile of pavement in eight minutes, we scheme attacks and outrun police liaisons. When advertising industries raise their denim cross-hairs, we use disguises to infiltrate their retail outlets and subvert their stranglehold on our sisters and brothers. We study in libraries what our district board refuses to teach us, we use radical computer programming tactics to allow fellow students to view what the administration has tried to segregate us from. We know exactly what we want; we demand the liberty to lead our own lives free of restraints and restraint, the right to refuse to be marketed. We demand what we once etched in mud before neighborhood games of capture the flag. We are willing to make the compromises we need to liberate ourselves; and when we speak of liberation, we mean total liberation. Consider this our declaration of independence; a convergence of thoughts, thinkers, crimes, criminals, vandals and scandals. We are poets of self and authors of our own lives; our active member count grows with every burnt diploma and cut class, every teacher who disobeys orders and actually interacts and shares with us and every parent who rejects traditional indoctrination and becomes our allies to independence. We will be free, consider yourself warned.

signed,
the Youth Liberation Front.