Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. [shouting] You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, [shouting] 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: [screaming at the top of his lungs] "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
I feel like this so much. I go to school and I see all this bullshit all the time and I just want to scream. But somehow my power to take such an agressive stand in expressing myself has been taken away from me. I feel sapped of energy and strength. Like I'm being crushed. It's one of the worst feelings.
At school, for all the tolerance stuff we do, I have to fight at least twice as hard to get the anti-homophobia stuff in. For every step I take, I have to fight so much harder. And lately, it seems like everyone else has been taking credit for all my work and then perverting it all into stuff that it's not.
I'm just trying to cling to some semblance of control over the events of my life. I think all control I have is just fleeting. And I'm so angered by that. I can't stop the people in my life from taking and taking. I can't stop the bad things I see around me. What am I supposed to do? I've tried to be vocal but at some point, why bother? Nothing ever seems to change. Ever. I'm too tired to try so much. I just wear myself out.
Quote of the Day
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
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