January 17th in Posso's Prompts

Take us back to a time where something you wrote helps to bring inspiration to you when you are in a rut.

My first interest with writing happened in high school. I applied to be the associate editor of the high school student page in the city newspaper, The Spooner Advocate. The concept was to have small blurbs and news stories from happenings in the elementary, middle and high schools. There would be features on sports, social outings, dances, plays, and then the student editors were also able to write opinion pieces and stories in the eyes of a high school kid.

Well, this guy as a growing child, decided to tackle something that was kind of a bigger bite than he could really chew. I decided to tackle the issue of writing about the American flag and what it is supposed to mean and how the general public treats it. I did my research and got all of the facts about the flag, how to display it correctly and all the different ways to show respect (and disrespect) though the U.S. flag code. As I rattled off points such as, wearing clothing depicting the flag is disrespectful and the U.S. flag should never be used for advertising purposes. (Look up the U.S. flag code and read it one time…and see how something written in history certainly does not apply in today’s settings) Well, I went off and rambled a little bit about how the general public didn’t respect the flag and how it made me feel not very patriotic. Whoo boy. Putting that line in a newspaper of a very conservative town?

The first death threat I ever got was because of this article. Back in 2003, most people still had landlines and a telephone book; there aren’t too many Posso’s in phone books anyway, so. I answered the phone after school one day and I’ll never ever forget this exchange:
“Hello, is Zachary there?”
This is Zac
“Well hello. I would just like to inform you that if you don’t feel very patriotic that you can take your fucking childish ass and serve in some wars and fight for me. You don’t deserve to be writing in papers until you’ve been in a war. Better yet, I can come to your house (reads my address) and I can just kill you today if you’d like.”
Who the fuck is this?
click
At this point, my dad is looking at me from the newspaper and said; “Let me guess. This is about your article in the paper.”

I pissed a lot of people off with that one. Sure, I was a kid. I also knew that a dinky small city would all be reading it at some point. I might have used some poor phrasing and facts to incite anger through the crusty aged republicans in my little hometown but to get a jobless old fucker to call and threaten to kill a 17 year old over feeling unpatriotic? Holy shit I felt on top of the world.

The next week I had to issue a statement apologizing for maybe taking the article a bit too far and making it ‘too controversial for my own safety.’ Fuck that, I was bragging about getting death threats in high school and to this day whenever I look to get inspired to write about someone, something, somewhere, I always remember being asked if I wanted to be killed over not being patriotic and it brings a smile to my face.