smashy smashy
This past weekend what I can only imagine must have been a considerable band of hooligans smashed up nearly all the jack-o-lanterns and regular pumpkins over a two or three block area, not too far from our house. Bits of smashed rind and pumpkin guts littered the street on Sunday morning, and much of the carnage is still evident today. I only hope the vandals were listening to "Tonight, Tonight" as they carried out their rampage.
As soft-hearted anarchists, Leah and I have a big problem with this sort of wanton destruction. Sure, we don't like authority—but someone really needs to catch those rotten kids and give em a talking to! Well, maybe not really, but we confess to harboring the sentiment for a moment at least.
It sets us apart, certainly, from the more traditional sort of anarchist. Smashing windows, lighting cop cars on fire... not really our thing. What exactly are they hoping to achieve, I wonder: the state is not embodied by the local convenience store, nor even by a police car. Breaking them is not going to advance meaningful societal change—on the contrary, it's probably the thing that's most likely to strengthen the forces of reaction! Not that I disagree with the sentiments behind the desstruction, but I don't see how it's at all helpful from a tactical point of view. Also, it's not very nice.
And it turns out being nice is important to me. I would never smash someone's jack-o-lantern because, heck, they worked hard on it! Ditto for shop windows (someone's place of voluntary employment) and cop cars (um... I'm sure you can come up with something good about them). In fact, so reticent am I to disturb anyone else's things that I even felt bad the other day when I picked up a bungee cord I spotted on the bike path. What if the owner comes back looking for it?! I wondered immediately after I wound it around my handlebars. In the end I kept it, balancing the likelihood of anyone remembering where it might have fallen an bothering to come back (under 50%, I reckoned) with my need for more bungee cords (100%). But it was a serious deliberation!
I'm forced to recognize that this is in fact a conservative impulse I harbor within me, but I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that. Anyone who hopes or expects that an anarchist society could ever work has to believe that people are, under some circumstances at least, fundamentally good. Smashers think that people are bad now and will be until the state is destroyed, but that doesn't seem workable to me. I prefer to be nice now, as an example, and hope that other folks follow my lead. If nobody smashes pumpkins, or takes things from other people, or, you know, stuff like that, well then we won't need cops anymore. And hey, wouldn't that be nice?