MyBerrics Rebellion

The problem with most of the world these days is that the people in it don’t really want to think. Let’s chalk this up to mass-education — disrelated, obtuse or useless facts crammed between our ears only to be memorized long enough to pass or fail a test and a week later even the correct answers are all but forgotten. In high school, I’d show up, sit down in my seat, lie my head upon my desk and stare at the floor almost the entire period. I’d do this each and every class until the last bell of the last period rang and I was unleashed upon the world. The teachers never bothered to ask if anything was wrong. I suppose, from where they sat, my shaved head, my baggy pants and my shoes they didn’t recognize the brand name of were all signs that lead to, or pointed in the direction of, that one destination most skateboarders at the time (and even now) were told they were going… nowhere. So I slipped through the cracks and barely graduated, 12th person from the bottom to be exact. But that didn’t stop me. Before you interpret this as a pass to fail out of school please look a little closer. In my years since the 12th grade I’ve realized that I am a pupil as well as a scholar and that I have and always have had an interest in a vast array of things. Things I came to study, or things I came to learn through experience because for the first time ever, I had been left alone. If skateboarding has always been closely connected to rebellion, a thinking skateboarder is nothing short than a revolution or coup d??tat upon the world everyone we know that doesn’t skateboard lives in. Watch Fully Flared or Mindfield to find two of hundreds of stellar examples of a thinking skateboarder. So in this shroud of darkness we sometimes call school, or work, or the cops, or cold weather or a dozen other things, there is something capable of proving brilliance better than any machine-made intelligence test ever manufactured and pulling us out of the mud and into a life we all could make for ourselves. Creativity. I’ll take a creative mind over one who has nothing to say but dry, textbook things any day of the week, and I’ll find those creative minds combing through the nearly 14,000 members, 5400 videos and 20,000 photos on MyBerrics.com and post one fruit of their labor on the Berrics every Monday for you all to see and be inspired by. Last Monday was Da Tiny Berrics. This Monday, The Barnerics. Enjoy. And I encourage you to keep ‘em coming, because we’re watching and on December 25th, 2009, two people will be rewarded for doing that thing which builds new civilizations. That thing which makes people on the outside scream rebel while we sit confidently and call it what it is, creativity. The prize? A trip to the Berrics and a shopping spree in our Canteen… on us. — sb