There once was a boy who went to a tough school. The student population was run by two rival gangs, and the teachers and administrators were too old to care, too out of touch to relate to the youth, and too tired to police them much, or fairly.
The gangs kept pressuring the boy to join them. There was the Westside Skinheads, a white gang that was well-organized like a lubed machine, a stickler for rules, and a bit fascist. They were very bright in the STEM subjects. They bribed the administration for good grades and even got jobs in the school after graduation to look after their own. They carried batons for weapons.
The other gang was the Eastside Anarchists. As you can imagine, they were loosely organized in many individual cells that communicated and worked together more like a lateral network; like a brain's neurons. They excelled in the social sciences, and some liked to enhance their perceptions with drugs.
Both gangs thought they were morally superior than the other and waged disinformation and propaganda against one another. One of the fronts in their ideological war was recruitment, so both wanted to know which gang the boy would join.
“Neither,” he said.
That was not possible, they said. You must choose one. You must decide.
“We are the soldiers of God,” declared the Skinheads.
“There is no god,” corrected the Anarchists.
“I will join neither of you,” said the boy. "There must be a middle way."
Then Westside Skinheads went on trying to recruit him in their terrible, twisted ways, while the Eastside Anarchists mostly went about their own business of trying to change everything in all the wrong ways.
The boy could finally see them both for who they were and what they were doing. From then on he did his best to ignore them both and go about his life. The Westside Skinheads were a cruel bunch filled with hate and the Eastside Anarchists were well-intentioned but misguided.
He was one of the few children who graduated the school without joining either of those horrible gangs.
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