'And yes, I could think of one way in which I was different. It was confidence. The people I knew who thought brutal thoughts and acted in brutal ways - the racists, the sexists, the bigots - never seemed to doubt themselves. They were always so sure that they were right. Mrs Olsen, at school, who gave out more detentions than the rest of the staff put together and kept complaining about 'standards' in the school and the 'lack of discipline' among 'these kids'; Mr Rodd, down the road from us, who could never keep a worker for more than six weeks - he'd gone through fourteen in two years - because they were all 'lazy' or 'stupid' or 'insolent'; Mr and Mrs Nelson, who drove their son five kilometres from home every time he did something wrong and dropped him off and made him walk home again, then chucked him out for good when he was seventeen and they found syringes in his bedroom - these were the ones I thought of as the ugly people. And they did seem to have the one thing in common - a perfect belief that they were right and the
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"We do not need magic to transform our world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already, we have the power to imagine better." - JK Rowling
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