I was interested in being an architect at the time, and the message of social conformism crushing individual creativity was very real to me, on account in my childhood experience it was actually happening.

That the original author of the story was in fact the next best thing to Satan wasn't really part of my thinking at the age of 10.

That I grew up in the American Southeast, as opposed to some socialist paradise which the Old South most certainly isn't, does not take away from the fact that in some circles, my making the above statement is infamia, an unforgivable sin, and therefore I am by definition evil.

I see diaries like this, I know what the intent is: to counter a grievous and misguided attack on communitarian values by a bright yet alienated woman.

Yet there is as much evil committed in the name of the social as in the name of the individual, and since the collective will, good, whatever is far more often invoked, well, calling it like I see it, I'll take the body count attributed to malicious advocacy of the self over the malicious defense of the commonality any day of the week.

On account the ratio is per my estimate on the order of  1:1,000, at the most favorable to collectivism in its various forms. And in my opinion, far closer to 1:100,000.

No one ever perpetrated a Holocaust, so that individuals may be free. No one ever set loose a pogrom or a lynch mob, to liberate. Just to defense a group, an identity, a commonly held notion of who gets to live and who must die so that the in-crowd may prevail.

One speaks of Americans being influenced. Most are influenced by various forms of defense of the herd far more than defense of individual liberty.

Remind me, then who perpetrated the Holocaust. I do believe it was a society far more in touch and the time -- and now -- with socialist principles.

Yep. I'm quite sure of it now.

Funny, how that sort of thing just...slips under the radar.

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)