Pocket Revolutions

(Blogging from the Airport, waiting for a Jack)


I happened to stumble upon this sight as i left a cubicle -
Truly, a poetic moment of rebellion.

A little symbol, stuck in an in-obtrusive location. In the most public of places, yet the most secluded of places.

It is nothing special actually, just another prosaic moment in life. But I find something definitive in the expression, a yearning for exposition, a pocket revolution.

It is the lot of the son to rebel against the father, an almost psychological urge to prove himself different, to assert his unique identity and set it aside from the generation before. It fulfills a basic need for identity, and to differentiate the individual assertion from the mundanity of the collective consciousness.

In such cases, laymen assert the claim that "rules are meant to be broken", as a symbol and driving mantra of those who seek fulfillment from the development of the individual psyche, an envelopment of a angst ridden mind with the little liberties and tinglings of freedom of expression, against the backdrop of a totalitarian rule, of nation, of society, of family.

However, such expressions are by nature selfish. It is the individual who benefits from such acts, the fulfillment of individual wants and needs, an action for the betterment of a singularity. Unavoidable as it is, it betrays a lack of understanding of the collective, the implicit nature of collaboration that is society, where each have their own part to play, driving the collective into progress, freshness and advancement.

The irony of the situation being that an individual, once subsumed into the collective masses, does not retain his unique identity and marker, and thus being unable to stand out from the crowds of mundanity, loses a certain power of the singularity. Society depends on the outcasts to redefine itself, to make trends move onwards, to push the borders of known thought.

A balancing act that teeters on oblivion, the individual resists the attempt to normalise himself, driving himself to further and further extremes in behavior. Thus the revolutionary is born, an expression against the world social order, a revolt against the norms.

Or perhaps its just some lazy bugger who didn't bother to just throw it away properly. God knows how many lazy people there are in this world.

Or is it?