Man Hood
M Alan Roberts

When you are a boy, growing up, one of the ideas that floods your young mind in manhood. All boys dream about the day that they will reach manhood and become the capable people that they were put here to be. They need this. Nothing else matters quite as much (except maybe nudity on cable).

I was no different. I desired to become a gunslinger, a roaming trapper, a bodybuilder - even a police officer for a stint. All of these dreams were in one way or another based on me becoming a "real man". They were my callow modus operandi of trying to force the concept of manhood into being.

As I grew a little older, I continued to forge my own path to what I believed to be the shortest passage to manhood. I wanted to live with strength, honor, wisdom, money and all else that was reported to me to be the essence of real men. And so I exercised, studied, practiced good deeds and always did my best to become a valuable man.

It didn't work for me.

Somewhere between Clint Eastwood and Paul Stanley, I got lost. The world continued to drench me in poverty and ill-fated encounters with the law. I became a juvenile rebel, hellbent on going against the grain of society. I wondered what gave one group of men, wearing their pretty black dresses, the right to control other groups. It came to me that the answer was the money. The honor, integrity, wisdom, good deeds and the rest didn't really mean anything, to them. However much money a man had seemed to determine the amount of respect that he received from his fellow humans. I thought, and think, that sucks.

When I was 19, I joined a metal band - and attempted to express my anger creatively and to fight society without having to visit the ever-growing number of jail cells that were springing up around me. For the next 20-something years, I led crowds of headbanging rebels like myself - and I taught them that it was OK not to follow suit. I gave them hope for a chance to live life the way that they decided to - not the way that they were being herded into. As I aged and raged, I became what seemed perfectly fitted for me to be: a man who capitalized on the organized rebellion against all those "real men" - (you know, the ones with all the money and the black dresses).

The world around me continued to tighten its controlling grip and punish those who dared to stand for something besides what they were instructed to stand for. They called me a criminal. They call me a hoodlum. They say that I am a menace to society. They continue to condemn me. This society demands that everyone, women and men alike, become optimal producers. The government wants to work us to death, while poisoning us to death with toxic food sources, while taxing us to death and disallowing us to advance financially. All this death was killing me.

And so I got a little worse.

I became a writer.

Now I spend my days attempting not-so-discretely to make people wake up to what's really happening around them. I tell them that they have been blinded - brainwashed from birth. They cannot exercise the freedom to just exist and be alive; they are not permitted to. Instead, they are forced to produce, to pay taxes, to succumb to the outright lies of political controllers, to ingest foods that are definitely killing them by the millions, to sacrifice their dreams and to die unfulfilled. In short, they are just human robots serving a madly-corrupt totalitarian government - an entity that wishes them dead when they fail to be able to produce for it. When they reach their "Golden Years", and should have the right to breathe easy and relax, they begin experiencing any number of debilitating health issues. And then they die, to be replaced with younger, more able robots.

So today I sit here, isolated in the wilderness, writing again. I wonder what there is to say that hasn't already been said - and I wonder if it even does any good anyway. And then I remember what I am here for. I am here to be a thorn in the side of the evil that dictates the conditions placed on "freedom". I am here to remain as a force that is unafraid to stand against what I am told that I am "allowed" to do. And I will never stop.

I made it after all. I am a Man Hood.