Thursday, October 20, 2011

My Anarchist Life

Interestingly, it was during a conversation with my pharmacy that I remembered, with all the drama of everyday life, that I was an anarchist. Perhaps the details are unimportant, but in being presented with a choice of colors for a night ware accessory, I chose black and red, pointing out that since I was an anarchist, why not. Over the years, and in my attempts to accommodate the more drearily conventional organizations I had decided to involve myself with, I’d forgotten. Mensa, and church organizations, even those more liberally religious, had dampened my fervor. But once I began to reflect on it I realized this powerful body of thought, with its emphasis on individual autonomy, was the ribbon tying together the pattern of risks I’d taken in my own growth. As a student at the City College of New York, I’d slogged my way through the alphabet soup of orthodox left organizations, finally accepting an invitation to attend a meeting of the campus anarchists. This proved auspicious as guests such as Tuli Kupferberg and Murray Bookchin, both now passed on, held forth. Through this aperture in my budding life as a political philosopher, I found my way into the New York Federation of Anarchists, dining on macrobiotic casseroles in the evening, then taking the First Avenue bus back to mom and dad later on. I’m now remembering passed Federation member and poet Alan Hoffman, then residing in a rear top floor apartment on Avenue B. With an elision of time allowing for a mental/emotional harrowing in my struggles with my family, I later became involved with Steve Brownstein, a subsequent member of what became known as the Anarchos collective and lived with him directly below Alan in the same building. This was in turbulent, revolutionary antiwar years of ‘67/’68, and I became involved in the beginnings of women’s liberation. As a founding member of New York Radical women, I helped formulate the principles of consciousness raising, moving us across the boundary from personal examination into the sphere of political action and thought. The idea of the individual as the repository of the way society is ideologically constructed moved me into the formulation that “the personal is the political.” That made it easier. It wasn’t just us anymore. We were caught in a snare of imposed thinking and role playing and it became increasingly clear that the only way out was through the vector of social change. I also participated in the lesbian feminist community in the early ‘70s as a ‘woman identified woman’. http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/wlm/womid/ Another elision of time, and I dove into the cauldron of cultural change holding sway in lower Manhattan in the mid ‘70s. Once again, I was caught in the doldrums of having survived a sojourn in another hothouse of personal/political growth and was ready to move on. It takes time to find others, but soon I became part of what was a powerful cultural transformation. Now, having become a member of the Hudson Valley Diaspora, I am increasingly aware of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is not going away, but instead is burgeoning into not only a community, but a neighborhood, movement and culture. I’ll be in The Megalopolis in November. Maybe I’ll have the opportunity to check it out.