Boi Growing Up

The uncorruptible. Incorruptible? Non-corrupting? Corruption immune? However you correctly say it, they are what exist in society as those that can not be influenced by outside sources. We are talking about the pure ones walking into those “not so pure” situations.

I was having this conversation with a friend of mine a while ago and the subject came up again. We were talking about the whole controversy with the police in the NYPD here and stuff. ..for the sake of a “tension free zone” for a while, I’m not going to be directly weighing in on that kind of stuff here. yet.. He said something very interesting that I didn’t think about before. You can go into the police force with the best intentions. The academy is filled with recruits just wanting to do good. But you get 2 outcomes with that. You can either join in on the underground things going on, be part of the group, fit in and become the very thing you tried to avoid. Or you can go against the status quo, attempt to hold on to your ethics, and suffer being an outcast or black-balled and distrusted. You can’t jump in mud and not get dirt on your shoes. You can never beat peer pressure.

Think about that for a second. “You can never beat peer pressure.”

Honestly, I think that statement is justified based on how we learn. Hello? We learn by watching it demonstrated or taught by someone else.

This came up at work because one of my coworkers, the one who I think is really cool and trained me, told me today, “Don’t let us distract you. We don’t want you to become like us and pick up our bad habits.” In my head I thought too late haha. It dawned on me though, is it actually possible to walk into a crowd, a group, a community, a city and not be influenced by it’s majority nuances? A kid who only hangs around bullies, may not be a bully, but he or she will know how to demean a person. Have a daughter grow up with 5 tough sons, she probably won’t be able to relate to the dress-wearing side of life. Oreos, Twinkies, Wannabe? just some words we use to describe individuals who go against their “normal” supposed path and conform more to who they hang out with.

It seems almost as if individuality is a foreign and theoretical concept, inapplicable to real life.

If everyone becomes like everyone else, then who is actually themselves? “Being yourself” isn’t actually being yourself. It’s being that person plus that person plus another person’s ideals plus that person from 3 years ago. Maybe if you want to get technical, this can equate to you still being yourself. A new combination gives you a different outcome from previous. You still lose any originality though. “You” didn’t come from you, it came from someone else.

You are not you.

You are a sum of everyone around you.

Til next time. Stay frosty.