Higher Education from Betray Whiteness by G_K-C

Higher Education

I open my eyes to see a room full of smoke.
I’m sitting on a sofa with a nose full of coke.
I look at the kids around me and see they’re all running wild,
drunk on depression chasing death like a child.
I smile, even though there’s really nothing funny.
I can’t feel my face and my nose is super runny,
as I’m pouring my parents money down the drain
by bombarding my brain with bottles of gin and lines of cocaine.

Trying to numb the pain is just making me more insane,
and incapable of caring for my own melting mind.
Consuming any substance of any kind
just to see what sort of higher education I could find.
Helplessly confused, and addicted to self abuse,
I stopped going to class to sit on my ass and get trashed.
Because using is so much easier than choosing to say no,
to the blow, to the bottle, both unending pot holes.
My name became a metaphor for the mayhem in my veins,
my brain barely maintained, stuck in a cycle of fear and shame.

A hypocrite, an aspiring addict, a privileged little punk wasting every ounce of my wit.

I had to get away to save the remainder of my days,
once spent wasting my savings and fainting on paintings.
Our pain we never admitted, which is why none of us quitted
pitting ourselves against the endless consumption of our hells.
Our futures being sacrificed to substances we pack at night.
Fighting a fruitless war against our own fucking feelings.

Yes we’re all hurting, but we are not all healing,
as we’re burning and stealing and numbing our feelings,
thinking we’re just kids when really we’re human beings,
only ever fully breathing if we’re also drinking,
surviving standardized teachings by snorting instead of sleeping.

You call it studying,
I call it sinking.......

We came here to learn what would come next in our future,
it’s a shame we all became a bunch of substance abusers,
addicted to hours spent staring at a computer,
wasted by our worry that we won’t have a future.

If I had to some up what I really learned at college
it’s that school in this country is no longer about knowledge.
Education is what we seek but it’s not always what we reap,
educators aren’t respected yet we expect them to teach,
and young kids to learn by sitting still in cold seats
from 8am to 3pm five fucking days a week,
then we’re told to go to college to get a degree,
but with tuition costs we’ll never be debt free.

See the future looks bleak when you’re treated like a child,
they tell us to calm down but that only makes us more wild.
Maybe that’s why I was smiling, coked up on that couch,
I’d finally realized what this lie was all about.

We came here to learn what would come next in our future,
it’s a shame we all became a bunch of substance abusers.

Embodying rumors and forming brain tumors,
concealing our feelings behind sarcastic humor.

Education is what you make it,
learn to teach yourself.
Read a book, ignore the bullshit,
and focus on your health.

This life is what we make it,
the meaning comes in time.
I abandoned school to organize
and obsess over rhymes.

The community is my teacher,
this life is my curriculum,
and I won’t stop speaking truth ‘til I can no longer feel my lungs....

• Emceeing
• Hip-Hop/Rap
• Spoken Word
• anti-establishment
• community
• respect
• Santa Cruz