Anarchist to Abolitionist: A Bad Quaker's Journey

They Started It!

I was working at the full service gas station I mentioned earlier. Other than Steve, his brother-in-law who was the manager, and one lady who was likely in her 30s, let's call her Vicki, everyone else working at the gas station were high school-aged kids.

Since we left Kentucky all those years ago, there was never a social life to speak of. There were no close friends that I'd go and do things with, no one I'd hang out with, and especially no one I went to parties with. I didn't go on dates, attend dances, or attend school sporting events. None of those things interested me. I spent my time trying to make money, whether that meant working for my dad, working a job nights and weekends, rebuilding classic cars for people for cash, or any other activity that would bring in a little more money. Any free time I had I spent exploring the desert. But working at the gas station with other teens exposed me to some other hard working kids, so one day we decided to meet in the city park and relax together.

Money was always tight for me, but that Saturday I decided to reward myself for all my hard work. There had been a hot streak and I had been in the sun every day that week. That morning, I opened the station but only worked until noon. I was paid for the week in cash, as usual. I clocked-out of work, picked up a six pack of beer, and headed to the park.

We met in a spot in the park that was mostly off the normal path, out of sight to most of the people in the park. Two guys and one girl, just sitting there with a six pack of beer, harming no one and doing nothing wrong. I was the youngest at seventeen, the others were eighteen. About half way through my first beer, two cops walked up and began harassing us. One of them picked up the remaining three beers and began opening them and pouring them on the ground. Then, he took each of our beers from us and did the same. Meanwhile, the other cop was telling us how lucky we were that they were such cool cops. They could have arrested us, but since they were so cool they were just teaching us a lesson.

I asked if the lesson was that if you have a gun, you can just take other people's property and destroy it at will, while pretending to be cool. He didn't seem to appreciate my question, but I didn't care. He was simply a thief and a thug. He was exactly like every bully I had ever known. He was serving and protecting no one but his own ego.

There is "difference in kind" and there is "difference in degree". A cop that enforces stupid, unfair laws simply because he's following orders is no different in kind to the Nazis who claimed immunity from prosecution at Nuremberg by stating "Befehl ist Befehl" or in English "Orders is orders." There are differences in degree, as the pigs in the park that day didn't try to throw us into a concentration camp, but there is no difference in kind. That means the nature of the thug or the authoritarian on any level is the same, it's simply a variation in opportunity as to whether he is taking someone's property or taking their life, which is fundamentally still property. There are people who would do such things because they are told to do so, and there are people with principles who think for themselves and will not obey orders, just because they are orders.

Having said that, I may have overreacted. Okay, I did overreact.

I left the park and drove straight to the local grocery store that shared its parking lot with the police station, in the town's only strip mall. At the time, my underdeveloped working theory was that the local businesses hold the true power in a small town, and the police are a direct reflection of the will of those local businesses. That theory has some merit, but it's flawed and is not correct.

Nevertheless, that was my belief at the time, so I saw the grocery store just as guilty as the police in the matter of the theft of my beer in the park. Nowadays, I understand that only the individual pig who stole from me is guilty of his actions. No one can be guilty for the actions of others, and no one but the individual who is guilty should be punished. But I didn't think that way then.

I went into the store and walked around for a few minutes, then casually snatched a bottle of Jack Daniels off the shelf and walked out. That didn't make us even, since the humiliation and fear that the pigs caused us still had value, but at least I felt like I had struck back.

Later that night, I parked at the opposite end of the mall from the police station. I took a pair of linesman pliers out of the trunk of my car and walked down to the police station. As I passed a pig car, I snapped off each of its radio antennas. Now, we were closer to being even. I did that a few dozen times over the next few years, just to let the pigs know that there was resistance.

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