Open Your Eyes.

Anonymous asked: You're cute. Like anyone?

Sure do!

“Think back to when you were a kid. Try to remember what caused you to gravitate toward punk rock in the first place. It may have been the loud guitars, the fast drums, the rolling bass, the harsh vocals, sure. But what made you stay? Chances are, so long as you allowed your mind to naturally evolve as most human minds do, it was that sense of community that made you stay. That sense of inclusion. That sense that maybe you were an outcast with weird hair and strange thoughts but everything was going to be okay because now you were hanging out with and listening to bands that thrived on being outcasts and rose above it to be better people, both within their scene and outside of it.

The definition of punk is intentionally (and fascinatingly) nebulous, but one thing that certainly isn’t punk is exclusion of your peers based on what are, let’s be honest, willful, needless, hatred-filled bullshit cop-outs based on nothing more than a subconscious need to be distant or “different”. Punk was never about that, even at its most crass moments. We’re all here—and entrenched in this scene—because we’re different. To exclude those that are also different (but different in a different way) for no discernible reason is unnecessary and counterproductive. It’s the antithesis of what a community actually is and how it’s supposed to function.

So the next time you’re armed at your keyboard with an insensitive (and ultimately unfunny) joke about faggots or trannies or whatever you might be pointing your venom at that week, remember how it felt to be alienated and excluded because of the loud music you liked or the weird clothes you wore. Remember why you got into punk rock in the first place and what kept you here.”