BroadSnark

I recently read The World That Never Was. I really liked it, despite the fact that it includes a gazillion people and can be hard to follow (even for someone who was familiar with many of the players). The book basically covers the period between Haymarket and WWI.

There is one part of the book where the author describes in the clearest and simplest terms what the liberal bargain was.  The government would “guarantee the property of the rich in return for welfare protection for the poor.” A bad bargain, if you ask me, but I suppose it was understandable. So here is my question.

Is it better for us to fight to continue that bargain, meaning for those social protections, or should we just call the whole deal off and go for the property?

Discuss.

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**  Sorry that I am not able to put up part two of my media post this week. Work has been busy and I haven’t been able to wrap my head around much.  So this little mini post will have to do for now.

Have you ever seen the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?  My friend @JamesTulsaALL recommended it. He thought the movie addressed some important issues. He was right.

For those of you who have not seen it. Jimmy Stewart is an attorney who heads out to the wild west to carve out his future. He is robbed and beaten by some thugs. It turns out that those thugs have been tormenting the town. The town sheriff, a bumbling and fearful fool, will do nothing. Stewart, filled with righteous outrage, is determined to use the law to put a stop to those thugs.

Also central to the story is John Wayne. Wayne is the town tough guy. The thugs don’t fuck with him. But he isn’t too inclined to do anything about the thugs fucking with everybody else, at least not until Jimmy Stewart drags him into it. Even though Wayne doesn’t want to get involved and acts like a hard-ass, we are supposed to know that he is really a good guy.

Stewart and Wayne play the liberal and conservative archetypes in that movie. Stewart is the liberal. He is an educated attorney from back east who hasn’t a clue how to fire a gun. He knows what is right and he is going to make sure it happens. Wayne is the conservative. He is tough. He can shoot guns and kick ass. People respect and fear him. The weak (including liberal Jimmy Stewart) need his protection.

Stewart and Wayne are the movie’s heroes. Stewart’s righteous indignation and lawyerly smarts along with Wayne’s brawn and good aim save the day.

The whole movie rests on the premise that an entire town full of people were completely incapable of dealing with a few thugs. The townspeople were, in fact, so pathetic that the best they could do was elect the most chickenshit amongst them for sheriff. You and I are supposed to believe that nothing can ever be accomplished without a hero. We are supposed to believe that we are helpless in the face of anti-social behavior.

I don’t believe that. I don’t have that low of an opinion of you or of me. And I definitely don’t think that we should design our whole society around what some disturbed people might do. Once you stop believing the myth that only a hero/politician/general can save the day, then the whole justification for the authoritarian state comes crumbling down.

At least in the movie, Stewart and Wayne actually did get the job done. In real life, Stewart and Wayne would be conspiring with the evil ranchers and thugs in order to rob us all blind. In the real world, there are no heroes. There is just us.

I will not guarantee that, if we managed to create an anarchist society tomorrow, it would not some day become authoritarian. Maybe some exceptionally bad outside actors would show up and the society would not be able to defend itself. Maybe internal divisions would weaken the community and make it an easier target. Maybe the society would, eventually, build back the kinds of hierarchies we have today. Maybe we would have to go through the whole process over again in 100 years or 50 years or even 10 years.

So what?

Should we not even try? Should we just concede to the people and systems that cause so much misery? “It won’t last forever” is a terrible reason not to pursue something. Nothing lasts forever. We should be trying for the best we can do, for as long as we can do it.

And we cannot fall for the myth that we are helpless in the face of a few bad actors.

One thing that really seems to throw people for a loop, when I talk about a world without rulers, is how we would decide who does what. The really interesting thing about that question is what it says about life today. By asking that question, you are pretty much admitting that

1. People spend most of their time doing shit they don’t want to do

2. All the shittiest work is done by people who have no better options

If you defend the status quo, you are defending a system which forces people to waste much of their lives. And you defend a system that absolutely must constrain our options in order to make sure that there will always be someone desperate enough to do the really shitty work.

There are some cultural beliefs that we are fed in order to justify this system. One cultural belief is that self-sacrifice is to be applauded. Well, self-sacrifice is not all it is cracked up to be. I’m not saying that life is all fairies and unicorns. I don’t think that the whole world will be able to lay around on beaches all day smoking pot and trying to keep the sand out of our beers. (Although more time to do that would be lovely.) And I appreciate those people who have spent their lives sacrificing themselves for their family and community. I also think it is a fucking tragedy that they had to do it.

For instance, I worked with a woman who had three jobs cleaning hotel rooms. She was a Haitian immigrant without a whole lot of options. Her life was spent cleaning up after people, most of whom treated her like shit. I respected her and the sacrifices she made in order to give her kids a chance for better life. But I think it is a tragedy that she had to make those sacrifices.

Meanwhile, other people that I have worked with have never had to clean up after themselves, much less anyone else. There are people who get paid to sit around reading journals and opinionating. They are often surrounded by “support staff” who clean up after them, file their papers, answer their phones, and generally make sure that they can spend most of their time doing what interests them. (And that goes for at home as well, where the support staff are called “wife” or “housekeeper.”)

The difference between the hotel maid and the researcher is usually an accident of birth, one which has largely predetermined how many options they will have in life. Sometimes an individual overcomes the odds. Sometimes an individual screws up every advantage they have been given. But we do not all start off in the same place. We do not all have the same expectations or options.

I think that sucks. I think it is a waste of talent. I think it makes people miserable. And I don’t think it is necessary.

All people should be able to pursue whatever interests them. Luckily for us, people have all different interests. I don’t like playing in the dirt. My parents used to punish me by making me pull weeds. They ruined me for gardening forever. But lots of people love growing things. So they would. So far so good.

What if there are some things that nobody wants to do? In some cases, those things just wouldn’t get done. If nobody out there thinks that knowing how to make a slinky is the coolest thing in the world, then the world will have to live without the joy of a slinky.  That makes me a little sad, but not sad enough to learn how to make a slinky.*

What if there are things that take huge sacrifices to learn? What if people need to go to school for years? Who would do that? Have you ever seen the sacrifices that people make to become ballerinas? What about people who go to med school and then go work in some rural village and get paid in chickens? There are some seriously dedicated people out there. A better question would be, how many obsessive geniuses have had to abandon their passion in order to do droll jobs to pay the rent?

But what about the icky tasks? Who would pick up the garbage? There will undoubtedly be tasks that everybody wants to be done but nobody wants to do. And those tasks will need to be split up somehow. In my office, everybody takes turns doing the dishes. It is sometimes a friggin disaster, to be sure. But we muddle through o.k. Perhaps this task could be accomplished more efficiently otherwise, but sometimes it is o.k. to compromise efficiency for fairness.

And the really great thing is that people would no longer spend time doing inane things just because one person with power got a bug up their ass. I cannot tell you how many reports and projects I have completed only to see them filed away in some bosses drawer, never to be looked at again. In a fairer system, that boss would be just another worker. And they would have to convince us that their project was worthwhile or do it themselves.

But what about tasks that come with power? Doesn’t specialized knowledge give someone a certain amount of power? Yes. Sometimes it does. I have told many a nonprofit boss that they should really, actually look at the books once in a while, because I could be robbing them blind. There is a certain power in having that knowledge. Some things should not be in the hand of just one person. In accounting, we have a segregation of duties that is designed to catch mistakes or fraud. Certain types of tasks may be important enough to design those kinds of controls. With other things, it may suffice to simply have backup people, or cross-training as the biz peeps call it. Those individuals don’t have to be at different levels. They can be equals.

Wont some people be doing tasks that are more useful? Maybe. But isn’t usefulness somewhat subjective? It is true that some tasks deal more directly with basic human needs, like growing food, but maybe the person tinkering in their garage will come up with an invention that unexpectedly makes growing food easier. Besides, some of those seemingly unnecessary things are what we live for. Food keeps me alive, but I don’t know how much I would like my life without music,literature, and sex toys.

What about status? Won’t doctors always have more status than people who make sex toys? Not for me! Seriously though, status is also subjective. What confers status in a community of artists is not the same as what confers status in a community of farmers. As human beings, each of us will undoubtedly value some human contributions more than others. We just have to recognize that not everyone will agree with our opinion. And so long as my low opinion of your work does not come with my having power to restrict your life, it isn’t really a problem.

What about rewards? Don’t some people work harder than others? Shouldn’t they be rewarded for that? Isn’t it demotivating when you work hard and other people don’t? Yes. Maybe. And sometimes. Some people do work harder than others. But those people who slack at the job they hate might work their asses off doing something they love. People may want to get appreciation for extra effort. But people are motivated by lots of things besides fear and money. Fear and money are actually really crappy motivators.

I could start talking about gift economies or maybe some of the interesting things that parecon has to say about division of labor. But I will leave those discussions for another day. The essential thing is not the details of how work will be split up or how people will receive what they need to survive, but the principles which we should be looking at when we are deciding how to do things. We should always be aiming for more freedom, options, opportunities, fairness, information, and creativity. We should always be aiming for less constraints, power imbalances, secrets, and mind numbing bureaucracy.

To some extent, what I am talking about is a huge change in thinking. We need to stop ourselves from automatically reverting to authority when we should be focused on process and organization. And there are certainly skills that we could all use more of – better communication and conflict resolution being two of the most important. But much of what I am saying here is widely known and talked about in business.

Read management books and they will tell you how customer service is related to employee empowerment. They will tell you how monetary rewards only motivate employees for a short time. You’ll read about the benefits of cross-training and autonomy. Some businesses even institute policies based on these principles –  to an extent. But the people in charge of the policies are always constrained by their need to justify and preserve the privileges that they enjoy within the current hierarchies. So they can never take things to their logical conclusion.

When you talk about a more just system, people will pose all sorts of problems that they want you to solve. These are always problems that are not really solved now. In fact, they quite often aren’t problems to be solved at all. They are tensions to be managed. There are always tensions between pursuing your interests and taking care of your responsibilities. There are always tensions where people have different priorities. We will always have to be vigilant that specialized knowledge doesn’t lead to power over others. But those tensions can be managed much more fairly.

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* I now have this song stuck in my head. Damnit

Juvanya made an interesting comment on my How I Became an Anarchist post.

I don’t think hierarchy is bad, but involuntary hierarchy is certainly bad. But its simple to explain to anti-hierarchyists that a committee cant sail a ship. But working on a ship is completely voluntary.

The ship analogy is perfect, actually. There are lots of different types of ships and there have been lots of different ways of organizing them.

A military vessel has a distinct hierarchy.  The people retain their status differences even when not on the ship. Historically, in many places, officers would be from aristocratic or otherwise very privileged families. The riffraff would not just sail into a position of authority. That is hierarchy of the worst kind.

But what about a pirate ship? Pirate ships were often examples of democracy. It was not unusual for the captain to be elected by the crew. It was not unusual for the crew to depose any captain who screwed up. And pirate captains were certainly not required to be of noble birth. That isn’t quite anarchy, but it is a might better than the kind of hierarchy on a military vessel.

I go on boats sometimes. I know almost nothing about sailing. I have no problem deferring to my friends who have that expertise. I have no problem with agreeing, for a few hours, to do what my friend says and to trust their judgement. But when we stop sailing, that is it. It is temporary. It is based on expertise and practicality. It is based on mutual agreement between people, none of whom are in a permanent position of power. And, although I am technically following their orders for a time, I am not under them. That is situational leadership. I have no problem with that.

As to working on a ship being voluntary, that is not always the case. Anyone who has been on the underground tour in Seattle has seen those trap doors through which they used to shanghai sailors. Clearly, many people who have worked on military vessels were conscripted. Even people who volunteer for military service, or sign up to work on a commercial ship, are not usually doing it because it is what they most desire in the world. They are doing it because of economic necessity and because they see it as the best of all the options they have. When I go on a boat with my friend, that is a real choice.

It is easy to confuse the need for situational leadership with the need for permanent hierarchies. We are told to conflate the two at every turn. But they are not the same thing. We need situational leadership sometimes – like on a boat, or during a natural disaster – but we never need hierarchy.

P.S.  All this reminded me of a cool documentary about some anarchist sailors.  Enjoy.

People often ask me how I became an anarchist, but I’ve come to realize that it was really more of a discovery than a conversion. I think most people hold anarchist beliefs. The click moment for me was when I actually began to believe that I could live in accordance with my beliefs.

When I talk to people about anarchism I often get the response that it sounds great in theory, but it would never work. People don’t think it is possible to organize without hierarchy. They point to all the scary people out there that they can’t trust. They look at how we can’t even speak to one another, much less actually work together to solve big problems.

The first two criticisms are easy to respond to. There are plenty of people out there who are organizing without hierarchy – from pickup games of basketball to cooperatives. And if you think your neighbor is scary, wait until your neighbor gets elected and sends your kid to war. The people who want to be “leaders” are always the absolute last people who should have power over anything.

That last one is tougher to respond to. There is no denying that we have a really hard time speaking to each other. And if you can’t even speak to each other, then you sure as hell aren’t going to be able to resolve conflicts. But it isn’t that we are incapable.  It is that we have been trained from birth to do all of the wrong things.

We don’t discuss things, we debate to see who scores the most points. Everything is broken down into heroes and villains. Nobody wants to hear an ill word about their hero. Nobody wants to hear a good word about their villain. If we read something written by someone we like, we ignore the weak arguments or fuzzy assumptions. If we read something by someone we hate, we look only for what is wrong and refuse to acknowledge any good points they might have made.

That’s assuming we are even willing to read things by people we hate. How many people only preach to the choir? How many people make sure that all their news comes from those with their same ideological leanings? How often do we let all our knowledge about another group of people come from media or politicians or some other filter with their own agenda – rather than talking to those people directly?

Where the rubber hits the road is where anarchists can show that it is possible for people from different backgrounds and belief systems to actually work together. We have to show that it is possible to resolve conflicts without coercive authority. And that means that we have to be open-minded enough to at least talk to people. It means we can’t be dogmatic. It means we have to acknowledge that nobody is right 100% of the time and nobody is wrong 100% of the time. It means realizing that you will never find anyone who supports everything you support. It means no more guilt by association. It means we should stop making assumptions about a person based on one thing they said or on the fact that people you don’t like agree with them.

That is a lot easier said than done. It is hard to have a conversation with someone who seems to hate everything you most value. It is hard to confront people’s prejudices. It is even harder to confront your own. Sometimes it isn’t even content, but style that seems to be the most difficult. Some people take a super logical approach to discussing things and seem cold and heartless. Other people meander through their stories and anecdotes, driving the superlogicals off the deep end.

We are all going to fail miserably a lot of the time. But we need to at least try. Our ability to create a different kind of world depends upon our ability to develop skills in communication, conflict resolution, and horizontal organizing. We know how to make revolutionary change. We don’t know how to make change that lasts and that doesn’t reproduce the same oppressions we fought to get rid of. Once we can learn how to resolve our own problems – without calling daddy, or the cops, or Smith & Wesson – the jig is up.

If we can manage to bring seemingly incompatible people to the table and actually accomplish something, then the naysayers will see that it is possible.

We have had a couple good snows this winter.  That means that I’ve had to navigate snow and ice covered sidewalks without breaking my neck.  Bad enough for me, who is generally steady on her feet when sober, but others really just have to forget about going anywhere until the snow melts.

It is a contentious issue around here.  Shoveling the sidewalk is supposed to be the responsibility of the people in front of whose building the sidewalk is, or at least so says the city.  There are lots of people who just never do it.  I know exactly which buildings in my neighborhood will be impassable year after year.  Now a DC council member has introduced a bill to impose penalties on those people who don’t get their sidewalks cleared within eight hours.

The proposed bill kicked off a fierce debate.  Why should residents have to clear the sidewalks when they belong to the city?  What if someone is out of town? What about the elderly and disabled? Will fines be imposed on them?  If not, who decides who is disabled and so exempt? Do those sidewalks just go unshoveled?  Can we trust the enforcers to implement the law fairly?  They don’t have a very good track record.

Do you know how we could know who is out of town or elderly or disabled and needs a bit of help? We could know that if we actually talked to our neighbors.  Do you how we could ensure that the sidewalks are clear so that those elderly and disabled could get through? We could coordinate with our neighbors.  Do you know how we make sure some city bureaucracy doesn’t bury us in tickets and fines? We could dispense with the bureaucracy altogether.

Charles Eisenstein did a talk recently on the gift economy.  He explained how gift economies create ties and obligations between people.  Gift economies are about strengthening community.  Cash economies, in contrast, separate people.  You give me a service.  I pay you for it.  Now I owe you nothing.  I have no obligation to you.  Isn’t this really the same dynamic?  I paid my taxes and now have no obligation to know or help my neighbors.  The city will do it. If my neighbor acts like a douche, I can hide in my apartment and have somebody else confront them.  All of it is to avoid the human relationships and obligations that any just society would have to be based upon.

A few months ago, I attended the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference in Baltimore. One of the sessions was called Beyond Street Protests.  We talked about different projects that people were working on or thinking about.  One of the people there was from Pittsburgh and talked about anarchists trying to build community by helping out their neighbors.  The subject of shoveling sidewalks came up.   There was a bit of joking around about brigades of anarchist sidewalk shovelers.  I mean it isn’t like you can change the world by shoveling your neighbor’s sidewalk.

Or is it?

I understand and respect the choices that many people within the anarchist community make.  I love the self expression and weirdness that is embraced in how people dress or act.  I completely respect the decision to be a vegan, to avoid chain stores, to criticize suburban homogeneity….

But there is a price that we pay by being too strict in those choices or too harsh in our judgments.

I have friends who grew up in the projects and really like suburban homogeneity.  They think it is great to live somewhere clean, without rats, where the plumbing works.  They don’t want to go to the vegan café, they want to go to Fridays.  And if I refuse to go to those places, I cut myself off from them.  If I am disdainful of their choices and dreams, they will know it.

I understand that people don’t want to support corporations and institutions that are at the heart of our problems.  But there is no way to extricate ourselves completely from that system.  We aren’t always going to be able to engage people on the most ideal terms.  And if we want them to consider coming to our spaces, we have to be willing to go to the spaces they want to be in, and to do it without raising eyebrows or preaching.

I’m not asking that anyone do things that are against their principles.  We all have to act in accordance with our conscience.  But we should understand that living in accordance with our beliefs can be an obstacle to working with people who find the anarchist subculture odd at best.  And rather than giving anarchists the side eye who aren’t fully immersed in that subculture, we should be happy that there are people who will be able to communicate anarchist ideas to audiences that we might not be able to reach.

Remember Maslow’s hiearchy of needs?  Sure you do. It is usually presented something like this.

You start at the bottom with the most basic needs.  As basic needs are met, you go up the pyramid.  I’ve seen a few of these pyramids.  They usually list the same stuff for basic needs – air, water, food.  They always forget the same basic need – care.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. – Jean Jacques Rousseau

I blame Rousseau, myself.  Man is not born free, he is born attached to his mother by a cord and is not capable of looking after himself for at least seven years (seventy in some cases). – Katherine Whitehorn

I often think of those two quotes, especially when people ask why there are so few women anarchists and libertarians.  The recent anarchist survey came back with 82% of the respondents being men.  Libertarian surveys also have lopsided results.

Why?

When I lived in California, I worked for a small nonprofit that assisted caregivers of people with brain impairments. I picked up the phone one day and spoke to a client who had just received her first bit of respite.  That’s where we provided money for the caregiver to hire someone for a couple hours.  The woman had been taking care of her husband since his motorcycle accident a decade before.  She was crying.  She said it was the first time away from her caregiving responsibilities in all that time.

Our program was paid for in large part by tax dollars, both state and federal.  Who do you imagine that woman was going to vote for when the time came?  Do you think arguments about taxation being theft are going to persuade her that she should forgo those precious few government-funded moments of freedom?  How does your vision of freedom actually help her?  Are you going to go take care of her husband for her?

The vast majority of our clients were women, more than 80%.  Nationwide, the vast majority of people providing care for aging or disabled family members are women.  And even where men do provide care, they usually spend a lot less time doing it.  All that care has a cost.  Caregivers are stressed out.  They are depressed.  They earn less money.  They don’t take care of themselves.  They are struggling.

Women are seen as caregivers.  Women see themselves as caregivers.   It is what society expects of us.  The expectation is that we are supposed to want to play that role, to relinquish our freedom willingly out of selfless motherly/daughterly/wifely love.  Why would talk of freedom be expected to resonate with people who aren’t even allowed to want it?

There is a small part of biology involved in the idea that women are caregivers.  Those women who are able and choose to get pregnant have a biological caregiving role.  But the caregiving role that women are expected to play goes way beyond what is biologically determined.  The ability to get pregnant does not make someone caring.  Once a child is out of the womb, there is no biological rule about who should or would do the best job of caring for them.  The fact that women are the caregivers in our society is socially constructed.

That doesn’t just suck for women, by the way.  It sucks for men too.  I worked for divorce attorneys for many years.  Some of those bitter, “men’s rights” activists do have a legitimate gripe.  I saw many men get screwed in their divorce because, historically, the default was for kids to be with their mother – the caring one.  I saw kids begging judges to live with their father, only to be denied.  It happens.  I hate to agree with those schmucks on anything, but the sun shines on even a dog’s ass some days.

And if the gendered nature of caregiving weren’t damaging enough, our “independent,” nuclear family focused, transient society has taken away the collective caregiving that women have historically depended on.  Now we are expected to take care of our kids and our aging parents, often at the same time, and with little or no help from other family members or the community.  Is it really a surprise that, as women’s caregiving responsibilities increase, they become more liberal?

I don’t claim to have definitive answers on why women aren’t responding to anarchist and libertarian philosophies in the same way men are.  But I do think that the gendered nature of caregiving, how little most men talk about caregiving, how central caregiving is to our lives, and how much caregiving restricts our freedom has to be a factor.

And I find it interesting, in the context of this discussion, that so many anarchist and libertarian women are childless or did not participate in the raising of their children – Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre, for instance.  I would be very curious to know how many anarchist and libertarian women are mothers.  Most women are mothers.  If we can’t reach mothers, we can’t reach women.

The fact is that every one of us had our baby diapers changed by a woman.  And there is a damn good chance that your adult diapers will be changed by one to.  Complete independence and freedom are an illusion.  It is an illusion that women are not in a position to hold.  We are interdependent.  And we are only free in so far as everyone is willing to share in taking responsibility for the caregiving that is a fundamental need for all humans.

Whoever is addressing the real life situations that women face is going to get their attention – whether that is liberals offering government social programs, conservatives offering church social programs, or anarchists offering something new.  Talk to me about how to have the freedom to pursue my dreams without leaving a mountain of young, old, sick, and dying to fend for themselves and I’ll listen.

Normally, I like Jay Smooth.  But this video really irritated me.

I understand why people are critical of the anti-intellectualism displayed by right wing populists who seem so disdainful of reading books, processing facts, or critical thinking of any kind.  But it amazes me when otherwise observant people can’t see that anti-intellectualism is reactionary.  It is a reaction to the idea that there is a small cadre of elites who are uniquely able to make important decisions on behalf of all of us.

There is no essential difference between supporting a ruling class based on blue-blood birth or ivy league degrees – it’s usually one and the same anyway.

The Christine O’Donnell commercial Smooth refers to is focused on morality, not intelligence.  She is saying that she will “do what you would do” in the context of not being a corrupt politician.  Now I have no doubt in my mind that she will be just as corrupt as the rest, but why not confront the issue of morality and corruption directly?  How does being an intellectual make someone more moral?  Is intellect the only thing of value in life?

For people who supposedly do a lot of critical thinking and evidence-based decision making, those who think like Smooth offer no proof that these supposedly smarter, more moral people are good leaders.  In fact, they seem completely blind to all evidence to the contrary.   Bill Clinton was smart and totally fucked us over.  Karl Rove is smart.  So is Paul Wolfowitz.  I hear Stalin was smart.

The intellectual hierarchy implicit in this way of thinking bugs me, but I think what bugs me even more is the abdication of responsibility.  In one part of the video, Smooth talks about how he wants to vote for someone who actually knows about stuff he doesn’t.  I realize that none of us can know everything, but that also includes politicians.  That’s (presumably) why they hold hearings and listen to people with expertise.

It reminds me of a blog comment that really irked me some time back.  The commenter was responding to the idea of anarchism.

I have literally no interest in doing much of the day to day running of a city myself, nor do I want to be at the mercy of “might makes right” types. I am happy to cede some powers to government to have them do those things for me.

So basically, the commenter wanted to be able to sit on their ass watching Top Chef without having to trouble themselves with the boring details of life.  And if their ability to do that is only won by giving power to people who will use it to enrich their friends, bomb children in Afghanistan, or put millions of poor people in jail?  Fuck em.

How selfish is that?

One of the reasons we constantly get screwed is that people think they can remain ignorant of policy and process.  They think they can leave the tedious stuff to others.  If we actually want any justice in the world, we need to take the time to learn boring shit.  We can’t just sit around in our underwear eating family-sized boxes of cereal, at least not all the time.  Maybe if we all got off our asses and did something we would find out that we are more capable than we have been led to believe.

A few weeks ago, I attended a Busboys and Poets A.C.T.O.R. on Islamaphobia.  Six local Muslim panelists talked about their personal experiences.  Inevitably, the subject of what to do in the face of extremism came up.

As an atheist who keeps a toe in the atheist blogosphere, I have read quite a few posts challenging believers on extremism.  Believers say that they should not be judged by the extremists within their religion.  Many atheist bloggers have made the case that believers shouldn’t be able to get off so easily, that they do need to be held to account for what is done in the name of their ideology.  At least they need to respond to it.

As an atheist, it is easy for me to agree with that.  I don’t have anything invested in religion.  I don’t get anything out of it.  I just don’t get it.  But as an anarchist, I somewhat understand the position that religious folks find themselves in.  I very often find myself explaining that anarchists are not just molotov cocktail throwing tweens.  I have to explain that people whom many would consider extremists are not the beginning and end of anarchism.  And I find myself and my fellow anarchists are often at a loss as to how to respond to actions we find counterproductive.

Now I am not trying to compare the situation for Muslims in this country (and around the world) with that of anarchists.  And I am certainly not trying to compare the people who flew into the twin towers with people who throw rocks through Starbucks windows.  The differences are profound and, I hope, obvious.  But Muslims and Anarchists do find ourselves in a few of the same conundrums.

Few people understand our beliefs or have any interest in learning about them.  The media rarely speaks about us except when something destructive happens.  We have very little voice to combat mainstream portrayals of us.  And we don’t often do a very good job of using what voice we do have.  Perhaps most importantly, the panelists indicated that Muslims have also been neglecting some badly needed internal discussions about divisions, rifts, conflicts, privileges, and prejudices.

For the most part, the panelists talked about being a good person, following their path, and demonstrating by their actions that Muslims are not all violent extremists.  I get that.  I often say that – as a middle aged, peaceful, dorky, woman – I just try to be an anarchist that defies stereotypes.  But that doesn’t seem a sufficient response to the edges, the radicals, the fringe, the people whose actions make you cringe because you know your whole group will be judged by them.

None of the panelists were explicit about distancing themselves from extremists, but that was essentially what was meant by presenting a different image.  Mazi Mutafa of Words Beats Life; however, did not distance himself completely.  He said essentially that, while he may not agree with certain tactics, he will not disown people within his community just because he disagreed.  People do things in desperation, he said.  They are still a part of my community.

He owned the edges. And perhaps all communities need to own the edges, whether it is Muslims owning extremists, a southern town owning the KKK, or anarchists owning BANA (a racist, anarchist group that I will not link to).

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to delve into what that means in practice.  So perhaps we can have that discussion here.  Does a believer have a responsibility to own all the people who say they identify with their ideology?  What does that look like?  If not, how do you avoid it when people will just lump you together anyway?  Do we have a responsibility to discuss the divisions and rifts and factions?  Should those discussions be public?