In the spirit of May Day: Or, how I became an Anarchist.
When I was young, very young; seven or eight, my parents got divorced. It was one of those epic, the world just blew up divorces. I remember a lot of fights (words and fists), venom and malice for years. It was not merciful in quickness either. The kind of experience that inevitably corrupts a child and makes the world seem a very dark, traitorous place.
My extended family were bad people (and continue to be, I'm sure, though I broke contact with them over a decade ago). Racists, backstabbing, obsessed with jockeying for status among each other and endlessly cruel. Looking back, it seemed like I was probably doomed.
I was forced into counseling by the Friend of the Court, and, thinking back - I'm sure it was bad. I remember many of the things I told them, and it kind of makes me sick now how "kid me" thought. But, I had this one counselor - his office was in Detroit. Now, this isn't today's Detroit. This was late 80's/early 90's Detroit. the Detroit that burned its self down every October in a ritual of self hate and anger.
He seemed rather par for the course, as I remember through kid's eyes. The one cool thing he would do was to take me on rides on the people mover (our sad little monorail) while we did our sessions. One day, we hopped off, walking through greektown talking and he said we were going to dip into a store to grab something (sodas I think). Nothing atypical.
In the doorway to the closed down shop next door was a woman, old and wrinkled and covered in dirt. She was wrapped in a stained old grey jacket against the northern autumn and even from a distance I could smell her. I stared, I'm sure. He smiled at her and crouched down, greeting her by name and asked how she was doing - said something about needing to get her a new coat. They talked for a few seconds, mostly her nodding insisting she was fine, even though even as a kid it was obvious she wasn't. On the way out of the store he handed her a coffee and slipped a $50 into her palm. A 50! That was, for the time, an insane amount of money; moreover, it seemed like a regular interaction. I doubt it was near the first or last time he slipped her a $50.
I stood back, trying to figure out what exactly I was seeing. To young me, nothing about this made sense. She was a bum, and as I'd learned from my uncle's constant diatribes against them - a lazy fucking piece of shit. Scum. Not only did this man talk to her, he knew her by name! They seemed almost like friends, and he gave her money! To me, then, this was almost sinful in it's wrongness. It was completely backwards.
When we walked back to the People Mover he asked me what I thought about her, obviously seeing confusion and probably disgust on my face. I told him it didn't make sense. It was wrong. I still remember the exact moment today, crystalline:
"Of course she deserves it. She's a person just like you and me".
I told him, weekly, she didn't deserve it. She hadn't done anything for it.
He crouched down and looked me in the eye, "She deserves everything she needs. She's hasn't done anything wrong, the world has done her wrong. She deserved that money because she needed it, and I was obligated to give it to her because the world had given him more than I need. She's fallen through the cracks. The world has cracks because it's broken; this is how we fix it"
I remember crying, a lot, afterwards - while he tried to calm me down, he seemed worried, maybe. That day was like a seed planted in me. Over the years, through all the chaos I navigated as the broken child of two incredibly broken people - even within all of the mistakes, the cycles of abuse and cruelty I worked my way through over the years that seed took root. It became my moral center, which, when the storms of youth eventually broke became the tree which holds up the sky of my world.
I don't know what the ideology of the counselor was (or sadly his name, I've always wanted to find him and thank him). Maybe he was an Anarchist, a Christian, a Communist or a Jew or Muslim. Maybe he had no ideology, or religion, and just knew right from wrong. But I didn't, and I'm not sure I ever would have if not for him, or the woman in the gray coat.
Later in life, my late teens, I found my way to Emma Goldman, Marx and Proudhon - people who, likewise, knew right from wrong in a world full of people and philosophers who never had that day in Detroit. It not only gave the nurture and care to grow that tree into a forest, a true ideology, but gave it a name. A name few people understand, and many think is foolish - but one I wear proudly.
That was the day I became an Anarchist.
