Welcome To The Anarchist's Mother

Dear Readers--

When I was a younger mother, all my neuroses were easily containable. All of my fears, worries, concerns, and obsessions were specific. Diapers, flu, fever, cold. Child abduction, schools, homework, bag lunches. Basketball practice, swimming lessons, clarinet.

I knew what I needed to know and did what I had to do to get the day started and then packaged up and put away for the night (dinner, homework, bedtime story).

But as my children grew up, my life lost much of its shape, the shape I had been hiding in. I was no longer that 22 year old girl who found herself pregnant. I was no longer focused on survival but on life and all of its complexity. Things weren't going by the book or the plan. And what was that plan? Could you run that by me one more time?

When my life shape broke open and spilled me out of it, one giant and confused baby, I looked around and realized that all my careful planning of the years prior had resulted in something I had not planned. My children were doing what they wanted to do not what I had scheduled for them. My marriage was taking a very strange path through some garden I had certainly not planted.

What was happening? Should I try to stop it? Fix it? Change it?

And here's the news flash--my children were men now and they weren't really interested in my stopping anything.

This blog is about that first push out into my new life and the things that have happened since I stood up, looked around, and started moving, trying to find my way, often in stupid ways, often in ways that were and are sublime.

Jessica Barksdale

The Anarchist’s Mother

I grew up amongst Republicans, but from the moment I could, I voted for Democratic candidates. I am all about Carter and Mondale and Dukakis and Clinton and Gore and Kerry and Obama. But I’m no political activist, moving quietly in groups of liberal to very liberal people. I have one friend, though, who was a member of the socialist party for ten years, but after she left the movement, she went to work at the post office. I know people who protest the war and carry signs, but afterward, they usually take BART home and have a nice plate of pasta paired with a perfect Pinot Noir. People work the polls, plant signs in their yards, donate money to various charitable and liberal causes, but no one is doing the big life sacrificing thing, that give-up-your-life-to-the-cause groove.

And then my son Zachary became an anarchist, or anarchy infiltrated my son. I’m not how to put it. My good-looking son suddenly had a mange of wild hair, clothes he borrowed or stole, all of which had holes in them, and shoes with soles that flapped as he walked. When I asked why he didn’t care about the condition of his clothing, he said, “I don’t want to waste time on what other people think I should look like.”

Over the course of about a year, he moved to the fringe of his fringe group of friends, those who didn’t believe in society as we know it. Then he left that final fringe to find a group of people who actively fight against society. They organize protests against army weapon’s deployment. They protest the ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) detention centers and the practices ICE officers use against illegal aliens. They mobilize groups of protestors, they push down police barricades, they cross picket lines, and get hit with batons. They make homemade slingshots and carry rocks in their pockets.



Suddenly, I met a number of anarchists, people who believe in no rules. They don’t believe in total chaos, but they do believe in the destruction of all known social systems in order for the phoenix of human group living experiences to be able to rise from the ashes.


But here’s one of the most important things I learned about anarchists. They don’t drive. Or they shouldn't because they don't have licenses. In fact, none that I've met but two have had a driver's license. The anarchists I know often hitchhike or elicit rides from other people who don't hold environmental values and anarchical ideals too dearly. Meaning, the anarchists I know mooch. Mooching might be necessary because none of the anarchists have "official" jobs and are always trying to economize. But it seems strange to bewail the melting of the ice caps and current oil policies and still use fuel--even tangentially--to get anywhere. Anarchists should walk and bike only. Those forms of transportation, however, might limit their effectiveness. My son would have had to leave for the 2008 Republican National Convention and the planned protest about a year before it began to get to Minneapolis in time.


But never mind that argument. It often goes no where, as so do many discussions with my son, such as, if anarchists believe in no leader or no government, how can they all be so organized? Have so many meetings? Have someone who calls the meeting in the first place? Know where to go at all?


Anyway.


In early 2008, my son was arrested at a war protest in San Francisco, swooped off the sidewalk with dozens of others and charged with nine felonies, all of which were reduced to misdemeanors during the course of the legal wrangling. But he was required to return for court dates or else face the wrath of the bail bondsman and the bounty hunter, and late in the spring, he drove down from Tacoma, Washington in a borrowed car with a suspended license and his “co-de,” a term that I learned meant co-defendant as I sat in courtrooms. On the last day of the visit, he was pulled over for having no front license plate, and very quickly, the Oakland police realized he had no driver’s license either. After narrowly escaping being arrested once again (he was thrown for a half-hour into the back of the cop car), he lost the borrowed car to the Oakland Police Department and Howie's Tow-and-Pay-Through-the-Nose. The anarchists were back to walking, which was complicated because they had to try to navigate the Kafkaesque car impound system that straddled the entirety of the Oakland city limits.


I ended up driving him and his anarchist pals around quite often in my Volvo station wagon. It was just like old times, except instead of the drama clique or the water polo team, I now had the anarchist squad in the back seat. They needed to be shuffled between a variety of spots: police stations, anarchist meeting halls in Berkeley, friends’ apartments.


When he called me to arrange a ride, I thought to tell him that anarchists should walk, but I couldn’t. Maybe my inability was simply because he’s my son, and mothers help their children. Good mothers help their children. Evolved mothers. Or maybe it’s because I’ve almost lost him before to drugs. In my mind, he’s forever on that gurney at Kaiser Permanente hospital, his eyes rolling back in his head from an almost overdose of the antipsychotic they pumped him full of when he flipped out on LSD. Maybe it’s because when I think of that time in the hospital, I can still see how dirty his feet looked, his toenails long and slightly yellowed, as if no one had ever cared for him.


I know I should say no to him. My mother tells me this, as does my boyfriend Michael and my former spouse.


So close. So close to losing him. Gurney. Toenails.


Instead, I took on the happy, obliging mother role I took on for years in different situations, my banter light and airy and neutral, as if I was about to drop them off at a roller rink or a pizza parlor or a movie theater. At any moment, I felt my son might ask me in a bizarre time warp way to stop at Burger King or McDonalds, but, of course, neither he, his friends, nor I believe in fast food any more. Instead, I feared we’d find ourselves waiting for an hour for the vegan falafel at the place on Shattuck Avenue. But more likely, they’d want to shoplift smoked tofu from Berkeley Bowl because anarchists often shoplift, but that is another essay.


While in the car, the windows wide open (these anarchists don't believe in using beauty or bath products because "the man" gives us the idea of how we should smell and humans should smell like humans), they discussed their beliefs.


The oldest of the anarchists, James, coughed and then told me, "All police suck. They aren't human."


“Excuse me,” I croaked out, falling out of my happy light mode. “What did you say?”


“They’re not, you know. Animals.”


I blinked, feeling my hands on the wheel. What are they talking about, I wondered. I thought about the woman who had been at my home just weeks ago. Okay, so Kate was only a CHP officer, but I think he'd have lumped her in there in the group of non-humans. Kate was working hard to raise her two children and was a woman working in an often macho and male dominated field, a woman who was generous and kind and very helpful. What James didn't know was that when my son had been arrested, Kate had helped and given me information about his situation and jail time.


"So," I said. "Every single human who works in law enforcement is non-human."


"Yes," James said. "I mean, if they aren't non-human when they go in, they go non-human when they are there. I had this friend, man. He like started beating his wife when he was a cop."


"So he didn't have deep-seated issues before he went into the police force?" I asked. "He didn't need a lot of therapy five years ago?"


"Police work calls for a certain kind of person," my son said. "It calls to their baser natures."


"But if he wasn't a cop, he'd be a wife beating bread maker," I said.


"But he is a cop. He's a pig," James said.


"You are generalizing, " I said. "You are making huge assumptions about thousands of people. Maybe millions."


Patchouli and cigarette odors wafted through the car. Someone clearly needed some Sure deodorant under his underarms. After a good long bath and maybe some antiseptic somewhere. I made a left onto Ashby.


Cars passed me by, the whir of traffic all around us. I had that detached feeling I get sometimes, the one where I seem to be looking down at myself when I get into strange situations. The part of me floating above yells down, saying, “What in the hell are you doing?”


How could it be that I was having this conversation? What shifts in the cosmos had made it so I was arguing like this with Zachary. He’d always been a rebel, the one trying to work his way around things, but had it really come to this sad, slightly smelly place? Why was I driving them around at all, this bunch of barely adult men who thought all people could all be any one thing.


“Umm,” I said, not sure where to go from here.


"You haven't seen what The Pigs have done to our friends," my son said, seeing my pause of thought. “I’m talking violence.”


I braked, almost causing a pileup near Whole Foods. The Pigs? I thought that term went out in the seventies, the phrase of choice in B movies that featured an actor I can only visualize but not name because it’s a B movie.


"But what were your friends doing?" I asked. "Were they where they shouldn't be? Doing something they shouldn't be doing?"


"What is wrong with peaceful protest?" James asked.


"Nothing," I said. "But there are laws."


"Right," my son said. "Laws to keep people from their rights. Laws that force people into inhumane situations. Like the war. Like the ICE detentions centers up north. Mom, we need to be able to stand in protest."


"I agree," I said, gunning through a yellow light. "But they have the right to move you off of private property."


"Anyone who would move us is a pig," James said.


“Even if you on someone else’s private space?”


“We have the right to protest,” my son said.


Again, I tried to focus, keeping my hands at ten and two on the wheel. “But wait. If the cops said 'All anarchists are pigs,' would they be generalizing?"


"Yes," my son said.


"And are you generalizing?" I said.


"But we are right," James said.


For a second, I wondered if I should ask how many times he’d watched the film Fight Club, but realized that wouldn’t help the discussion. But it was as if they took a page from that book, hoping that like the movie if not the book that there would be a happy ever after ending amongst the ruins.


At the intersection of College and Ashby, I looked in the rear view mirror at the men in the back seat and then at my son sitting next to me in the passenger's seat. Two of them had barely said a word the whole car ride, and I wondered if my son and James were the mouths, the voices, of their group. But they were all so young--between the ages of 19 and 23--and they were living their ideals as only people that age can. Their bodies and possessions exuded that belief--the smells, the used clothes, the heavy backpacks full of cigarette lighters, pamphlets, wool hats, and old socks, rife with holes, everything tucked away in case of emergency like a towed car or a surprise protest. They were itinerant idealists, roving the country, spreading their message.


My son used to have a home, a job, a steady girlfriend. Clothes without holes. A dishwasher. A car and a driver’s license. He had money, a savings account, and a telephone number. He has a college degree that sits inside the paper of the diploma he gave to me to hold onto. They had given up so much to do what they were doing--or was it really that they were scared of doing what people have to do in order to be "successful" in this country? Did my life make them sick? Did they think that my writing and teaching and standards of living make me a pig? Was the very car that they were now sitting in remind them of all that was wrong in the world? What would my house tell them? Would they see my new furniture and electronic equipment and judge me by my purchases? What did they say about their own parents? Were they truly right? I didn't hold any of their beliefs, except for the idea of getting us out of the war and the rights of people to immigrate freely. They believed in the rights of individual human beings to those of the group, the disbanding of government, the complete reformation of society. I believe in some really nice modifications, such as wind and solar power. They thought all police officers are pigs. I believed that there are sick individuals in every group of human beings. I believed that it's possible for change to happen. They actually believed it's too late.


"Don't bother thinking about your retirement," my son told me during our first trip to try to get the car out of hock at the police station on the corner of Hegenberger and MacArthur. "It won't happen. The economy will fail before that."


"When I call," he had also said. "Believe me. Don’t ask questions. Move to the country. Get out of the city. Don't ask questions."


“What do you mean?” I had asked.


“Grow a vegetable garden. Learn how to can what you grow. Hide money under your bed. Be very, very liquid.”


I had wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t funny. And yet, I couldn’t say to my child--the boy now man who had almost died just a few years ago, the boy with the wicked sense of humor and the ability to write a story--that I wouldn’t help him any more. That I absolutely did not believe in what he was saying. Not one bit. That I was saddened by the way he lived. That he needed help. That he was wrong.


If I said all of this, he could disappear. And it would be so easy. All he had to do was pick up his backpack, hold up his thumb, and he’d be gone, a dot on Highway Five, and then nothing at all.
Now in the car, I breathed, focused on the traffic in front of me, tried to find words, that wouldn’t shake us into the next part of our relationship. The part that was apart. I knew it was coming, but I wasn’t ready. I’m still not, even though his absence is easier to see than he is.


These young men held firm to what they thought, wanting, in a way, all they predicted to come true. Would they dance while Rome not only burned but lay in ruins? Would they really be happy is the towers of finance blew up in one extravagant fire?


They were fighting for the end of governmental control but then what? What life experiences did they truly have that would keep them alive?


They believed strongly and wrongly, and as we cruised down Highway 13, we went through the argument one more time before I finally pulled off the highway, headed up into the hills, and then into my driveway and turned off the car.


"Do you want some waffles?" I asked, already feeling the spoon in my hand, feeling the warmth of the griddle.


They all smiled. "Yes," my son said. "Please."