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Sob story:

I live in a small college town with a large anarchist presence. Over a decade ago most of my friends moved away to bigger cities and I was left with these weirder, more moralistic (although they would argue that) new gung-ho insurrectionary arrivals to the college, which, frankly, sucked. I had a kid and felt like this place was a better place to raise them then moving to a ghetto in a bigger city, which is where most of my friends could afford to move to when they left, so I stayed.

Small town group dynamics are a fucking nightmare for people in general, but with how incestuous and rigid some anarchist spaces can become, it can be especially hard for people who have had years-long legitimate beefs with certain people over ideas and organization (ie, student activism vs. not that or ParEcon vs. not that ). When I spoke out against these kind of liberal student activisty anarcho-types, I made some enemies, and a lot of that came down to just not being able to argue or debate ideas. I would try to cut down their beliefs and hoped they'd do the same to me, but instead of critiquing my critiques of their critiques, they critiqued me as a person and their critiques devolved into insults and rumor-mill.

When the friends I did have left and this new group of students moved in, even though we could kind of share ideas, there was a huge pull for them to build bridges with these activisty anarcho-types. The way they did that was with demonizing the individuals who the activist-types deemed to be social pariahs. So, for example, couples who had bad break-ups and one of whom was with the 'in-group' (Cabal-Argot) then the other might have their house attacked or have their band's show posters ripped down all over town by these enforcer types. It was fucking odd.

Anyways, my friends left and I was left with the left-leaning (although, again, they would argue that) enforcer types. Because of the endless rotating door that is a small college town, I was kind of stuck with them because superficially we shared similar ideas (which isn't the best basis for friendship). But eventually I had my own moment when the pack turned on me.

Since then, I've worked on anarchist adjacent creative projects, like parenting. Also, comics, wildlife identification, stories, scripts, jokes, etc. Rarely, I'll write an article or post a comment directly to anarchist platforms or publications. If I do share my anarchist ideas, it's mostly with socialist-leaning neighbors and if they seem interested then I'll print them out copies of bolo'bolo because I'm too lazy to try to explain what an anarchist society would look like.