180°

I need to read more.

In the past week I’ve learned that Mother Teresa was a horrible person, and that Machiavelli was a cool dude.

Yes. Seriously. Is your mind blown? Because I feel like someone just shoved a stick of dynamite in my ear and lit the fuse.

It’s like being told that the black hats in the cowboy movies were always the good guys, you just didn’t know it.

"Those bulletholes I put in your chest
are seriously misunderstood."

And honestly, I was seriously bummed about the Mother Teresa thing. This was supposed to be someone you could look up to, not someone who purposely let people die who could have been saved, because she was only interested in working with dying people, because their suffering let her feel closer to God.  Then I find out that the whole reason people saw Machiavelli as a scheming douche, was because of one thing he wrote, The Prince, which was an outline on how he thought the Medicis should run the government. Except, wait... he didn’t think that. Everything else he ever proposed or wrote went exactly counter to that. It’s pretty much the same as going to the ice cream stand, the server handing you a cone where half the ice cream is dripping down the side already, and you saying, “Thanks. Next time please just put it in my hand.” And then you get a pile of soft-serve in your hand for the rest of your life, because no one gets that you didn’t actually mean that. This one interpretation of the facts has blackened this guy’s memory for a couple hundred years. My dear hobos, it leads me to ask myself questions about who can I trust? Clearly, not most of history. Or the teachers who teach it. Can’t trust the media machine that comes through the TV. Or dick government officials. But these are all things outside myself. I can trust myself. To look things up, to dig a little deeper. I can trust the people closest to me to be good people. I can be secure in the knowledge that no matter how crazy the world is, or whatever thoughts you have about man being essentially good or evil -- fact is, there are good people out there. So, I’m not feeling quite so disheartened anymore about Miss Calcutta being awarded Miss Congeniality. If we have to look for heroes, there are plenty of regular people in this world more deserving. And if that fails, there’s always Machiavelli.