Punk Damage: How The Punk Scene Gave Me Tools and Hope - Once It Stopped Screwing Me Up. In 2013, when John Roderick’s “Punk Rock is Bullshit: How a Toxic Social Movement Poisoned Our Culture” was printed in the Stranger, Joe Biel didn’t read it. He was too busy dealing with the immense wreckage caused by refusing to grow up and not giving himself any agency in his own life. He had bought wholesale into the promise of punk from a very young age into his late 30s. When explaining the culture of living this way daily to a current partner, Biel witnessed, for the first time, the look of horror on her face. In this extended treatise, Biel details the various ways that growing up enmeshed in an empowering subculture committed each of us to a life of service to others and the accompanying downsides...and how he eventually stopped accepting the bad and only embracing the good.