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When I was a child I thought I understood what power was. I thought I knew so much in my innocence. To me, power was what the bullies had in the playground. Power was the ability to command other people, to make them do and feel as you wished. How mistaken I was. I had always been taught to 'love thy neighbor' and to 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Apparently it's all in the Bible but I was never particularly religious. It just seemed to make sense to me to be nice. I couldn't understand why things like that were actually taught, until I met my first bully. Then I realized that power was the ability to go against morality and get your own way. How wrong I was.

After leaving university I began work, as most folk leaving university do. I had an academic degree, and as a result I ended up working the kind of job I could have got easily at sixteen. This was verified by the fact that when I started there I was one of the oldest people on the floor I worked on. Even the team-leaders and some of the mangers were younger than me. I was taking sales calls for seven hours a day. Selling kitchens with a Philosophy degree, it made me want to shoot all the careers guidance people at my high school who told me that any degree guaranteed a good job. Of course, not many people bought kitchens on a continual basis so I spent most of my time surfing the internet. Everyone else around me would be chatting about pop-music or sports or some woefully bad television program. I was more interested in reality than reality television, a concept which seemed to me to be a paradox but try explaining that to a 16 year old kitchen salesman. Of course I knew many things of the outside world, I had come to learn much about the countries of the globe and how they went to war for wealth and glory. When I started researching these thing properly as I sat at my workstation, however, I was horrified.

I began to learn how the country I had grown up in and loved so much had killed many people to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. I learned that I had voted for politicians who supported terrorist regimes in my name. I learned that all over the world people were living in poverty while making my shoes. I learned that the concept of power from my childhood existed in a scale far beyond my imagination. Above all, however, I learned that I was surrounded by people who were not only ignorant of the facts, they simply didn't care. "You and your crazy politics," I would be told by

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