And these tiresome paper dreams, paper dreams honey...

Everything's swimming in my head tonight. I hate the time it takes me to do anything. I hate my lack of optimism and my unintentional complaisence. I hate how I underachieve without meaning to.

I feel so vulnerable. I'm seventeen. But everything I do in the next two months will dictate my entire future. I don't know what I want, or what I'll do next year, but it won't be university. I need time and space, and a second chance, and some calm before the storm of life as an adult. I don't want to travel, or help people, I don't have an exciting project planned for next year. I don't know what's good for me. I feel like I'm making my life up as I go along. I'm not sure if it's down to fate, or laziness. I've made the wrong decisions, I've wasted time and wasted energy. I've become cynical, and nervous and emotional and confused. I find talking so difficult. I disappoint people, I mislead them, I annoy them. I try to change and fail. I do the right thing for ten seconds and it's an achievement. I celebrate by doing the wrong thing again. I find myself doing the exact things I criticised in other a year ago. I dream and provaricate and complain. I don't know how to change. I forget things, and blame myself.

It's completely shattering how different everything looks now compared to one year ago. I remember Claire in her red coat telling me not to take the IB. I remember thinking how silly and hysterical she was. I remember truly believing I had made the right choice. I need to stop blaming others, and I need to stop blaming myself. I feel inadequate, and inarticulate.

David Irving was sentenced to three years in jail tonight. I am glad he is finally being brought to justice. What he said about the Holocaust was a disgusting racist lie. He cannot dismiss it as opinion, nor can he trivialise it as seventeen years old. If Irving had studied the IB and written a TK essay he would know that a statement like "The Holocaust did not happen" cannot be considered opinion and has no subjective basis. I am a strong believer in freedom of speech, but as with any freedom, it comes with responsability. Disguising racist lies as truth or opinion is not exercising social responsibility, and it is this which makes the anti-Semitic lies spawned by the National Front, the BNP and Irving, and the racist cartoons printed in Denmark completely despicable. Freedom of speech does not excuse outright discrimination.

On the other hand Blair's ludicrous ideas about banning the glorification of terrorism are stupid and futile. Blair is trying to delude himself, and us, that 9/11 and 7/7 happened as a result of some kind of legal flaw, and that a restriction of civil liberties will somehow solve all his problems. It is patently obvious that both events were largely due to US/UK policy in the Middle East. Everything Blair and Bush have done for the 'War on Terror' has been immersed in ambiguity and propaganda. As Nancy Snow put it 'the phrase "War on Terrorism" is itself a propaganda message. By design it elevates the language of conflict, suggesting that all other options (negotiation, international courts of justice, international policing) have been exhausted, when the reality is they were never seriously considered.' At least in Britain, shockingly monopolised as the press may be, we are not subjected to propaganda as deceptive and offensive as the US campaigns, where adverts are even targeted specifically at women: "You, as a woman and perhaps a mother, may be in a unique position to act against international terrorism". The fact that the US government generates this is even more disturbing than the fact that American women respond to it...
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