 Hi this is Mitch Mitchell. I want to start off with a question. Does this kind of shirt go with this kind of shirt underneath it? You know I've never really been big on fashion and I'm not really sure. I thought about wearing a dark shirt underneath it. I said maybe that would work. Then I know some people wear white shirts. I don't know. Turns out I don't really understand colors at all but that's not really what the point of this video is. I'm just asking the question. If that gives you something to talk about let me know. Here's my thing that I want to kind of talk about today and I'm gonna tell you some stories. I'm an only child. I was a military kid so we traveled around a lot but any time we got to a new place I basically had to try to start making new friends. And as a kid you pretty much put yourself out there. Hi how you doing? You tell them what your name is. They may tell you what your name is. They may just walk away. And you suffer sometimes a little bit of embarrassment or a little bit of depression or whatever but then you just move on to the next kid. There's tons and tons of kids and you just do it. And eventually you end up kind of with your little circle of friends and you know then life seems to be pretty good. But I started to think back kind of on my life because it really wasn't always like that. For instance I as a little kid I lived in Tokyo Japan and we lived on this little base there and I started to think that I didn't really have a whole lot of friends. I knew a lot of people but when all of a sudden done I spent a lot of time by myself riding my bike going on my adventures doing whatever. Then when we came back to the States for the most part even though I knew a couple of people here and there I spent most of my time alone doing the exact same thing. When I lived in Kansas City when my dad was in Vietnam I definitely was by myself most of the time because that school wanted to kill me. Different story I put that in a blog post that I'm going to link to here just to mention that. But you know those people wanted to kill me. They didn't want to be my friends. Then I lived in Limestone, Maine. You pretty much can't get anywhere further north than Limestone, Maine unless you're in Alaska. But as far as still being attached to the mainland that's where I was. And there I actually started to have some friends. Some people I could really say were my friends. But once again not a bunch but I had some. After my dad retired from the service and moved to this area I live in Liverpool, New York and Liverpool has never been that much of an open place. Had we gone to a different area of Southern New York I probably would have been welcome with open arms and everyone would have been used to me because that's where the military base was. But we moved to a place where not only were there just way too many people. In my school I had 3,800 people in my school but there were maybe 50 black people if lucky and I was from out of town so I didn't even grow up here. Not a good combination. So you take that. I met a few people that was pretty cool but in general you know I spent most of my time alone. I got to college my first couple of years. I spent most of my time alone. Then for two years I was the man. I don't know how I got to be the man but I was the man. People knew who I was all over campus. I had no clue. We didn't have internet back then there was no social media so wasn't anyone sending all kind of stuff about me but I was the man for a couple of years and I enjoyed that. Had my first girlfriend went to my first dance. It was pretty cool. Did my first public appearance playing piano and singing a song. There was a story. Let me tell that one someday. But I had two really good years and then after that I knew it was coming. Graduated college. Now I'm basically by myself again. And for the most part I have certain friends here and there. I have people that I know online that I can't say or necessarily my close friends. You know I'm friendly with a lot of people. But basically it's just me. And I do my thing and I put my stuff out here. I'm doing the videos. Don't have a lot of watchers yet but I hope to. But still I do my thing and I get by and I'm just fine. Now you're probably wondering okay so he just gives this big build up what is this leading to. Here's what is leading to. We are now in a society where people get bullied online and people get bullied offline. Now offline I can't really say much about it except for the fact that what my dad told me and I actually did it a couple of times was that if you're dealing with a bully find a stick wait till the bully to start something and smack that bully as hard as you can with that stick and keep hitting them until they decide to leave you alone. That's what my dad told me. I did that. Of course my dad was a master sergeant. We lived on an air base. People responded differently back then. Today kids carry knives. Some kids carry guns. It may not work the same way and I know there's some people out there who say well violence isn't the way to answer anything. Sometimes it is. But you know what else is? Basically telling yourself I don't care. Who cares what you have to think. I'm gonna do my own thing. You know for instance when I first moved to Limestone Main and like I said I didn't know anybody. It was cold and back then you could actually order books and they would be sent to you. You know you got this catalog in school and you would order the books and you paid just a little bit of money and then they sent you the books and you got the books for so many weeks and then you had to send them back. And that's what you had to do in Limestone Main because there was no library. I mean the school had a little library but there was no library anywhere. So this is what we did. And I got into reading these books on black history at the time and so I was just fascinated by this. This was nothing that there was ever being taught in school. So I was reading these books. I was learning a lot and then I started telling some of the people about what I was reading and you know what all of a sudden I was labeled the radical. That's who I was. For basically my four and a half years in Maine I was the radical. Why am I the radical? Because I was talking about these black history heroes that no one else really cared about. And of course the early 70s was that pivotal time. You know it was after you know Dr. King had been assassinated and there were all kind of riots going on and you know fussing and all this other kind of mess that people were hearing about all over the place voting rights which we still have issues with. And you know my thing was I don't care. I don't care. I didn't just read those kind of books though. I read other books. I read books all the time. It wasn't just comic books although I loved comic books back then but I read all the time. I was learning a lot of stuff. I didn't necessarily mind spending time by myself. I didn't mind you know sitting in the house sometimes practicing sometimes I didn't like it but sometimes I did. I spent a lot of time by myself. There's nothing wrong with that. People are not always going to like you and people may try to bully you and people may say all these kinds of things. You know what? Too bad. That's tough on them. Now you know I will sit here and say that it's a little different sometimes where it feels like you have this mess of people against you. But you know what? I've been there. I just mentioned this in the Liverpool High School. Now one of the strange things about it is that even though I kind of felt overwhelmed by all these people there were some things I still wanted to do that I still did that some people didn't like because I was not one of them and you know what? I did them anyway. I was the school ping-pong champ. I was the school badminton champ. I scored 100 on those achievement tests which we used to take back there in math. So I suddenly was in the newspaper and I got all these scholarship offers. My senior year. Even though I didn't go out for any of the school teams I played in any real sports. My team won the football championship. My team won the basketball championship. My team won the softball championship. We just did that. I was on every school one of those teams. So people didn't like that. People didn't like that. You could beat them at things because they just saw you as an entity. Now what? I didn't care. I went out. I did my thing and then I went home. And I bowled. I was you know pretty good bowler. I actually won a trophy for that. And you know you just do your thing. You do whatever makes you happy. You do what makes you comfortable. You do what hopefully might make you successful. Might make you some money. Or you just you know come back home. Do your thing. Watch TV and do whatever. You know you do things for you. You don't care what someone else has to say. Couple days ago there was this this news story about this little girl. And it's a little girl. Four years old. Are you kidding? Who some boy came up to her and said she was ugly. And she said I didn't come here for a fashion show. I came here to learn. I mean I love that kind of sass from a four year old. But my goodness. Are you kidding? You have to be ostracized at four years old. Four years old just because someone else didn't like what you were dressed like. This is terrible. But you know what? She answered it right. You go and you do these things for you. You need to think about doing things for you. We all need to think about those kinds of things. This is just my message today. So that's my question to you. That's my message to you I guess I should say. Don't worry about these people who might hate on you. And don't worry about these people who might be bullying you on internet or whatever whatever whatever. Who cares about those people? Care about yourself. Now physical bullying. I'm not saying pick up that stick. But I'm saying that that would stop a lot of bullying. No don't do that. Well you know what? Report it. I know what you're gonna say. Oh everyone's gonna call me this and that. Who cares? I don't care. Protect yourself physically if it comes to that. It's internet stuff. Internet bullying whatever. Who cares? You know you can always block trolls. Nothing says you have to feed into that kind of hate especially when it's directed at you. This is my word today. Let me know what you think. I'm Mitch Mitchell. Y'all take care and have a great day.