… and people are selling  hats on the metro.  “Peruvian style hats.  Keep your ears warm, in colors to match your outfit or your shoes.  Only five dollars.”  The mans sales partner then repeats the pitch in Spanish.  A teenage boy staggers down the aisle and asks, “can I please have a dollar.  I need something to get something to eat.  I’m starving.  My stomach hurts.”  He seems so young, in the childlike way that his voice expects someone to take care of him, implores that someone take care of him.  Seconds after the hungry boy moves to the next car, another teenage boy in a fashionable jacket and wearing headphones enters the car.  He looks like other boys I have seen on big city public transportation – stylish and handsome, but this boy moves with a quiet confidence instead of the usual swagger.  In a minute, I look over and see that he is covering his face and silently crying.  He tries to compose himself, but the tears keep coming.  The people nearby steal nervous, sympathetic glances, unsure of whether to risk embarrasing the boy by aknowledging his tears.  Finally, the woman sitting across the aisle from him hands him a tissue.  He takes it and gets off at the next stop.  The woman and a man sitting nearby talk about their jobs.  The woman gets off the train and the man shots after her asking if he can give her his number.  The woman says that she’ll see him tomorrow.  The man sighs, contentedly as we sinks back into his seat.  The man and I get off at the same stop.  It is raining steadily now.  He says, “it’s like they say, the further west you go, the wetter you get,” and I can’t wait to be moving eastward again.

I was reading this glossy, colorful magazine about revolutionary anarchism and was a little bummed that some of the articles about actions read like the articles in Soldier of Fortune that my friend got when he was going through his self-ascribed “paramilitary skater” phase in his early teens.  It’s always hard for me to read stuff like that because there’s always this seductive quality to it.  It makes me think that most of my political involvement has been by choice and not because my physical or even emotional survival was really wrapped up in whatever cause I was advocating.  And even though I can intellectually construct, not even untruthfully, the connections between those struggles and parts of myself or my history, I always end up having conversations with people who just seem to have this incredible sense of connection and of neccessity to their struggles.  I don’t exactly know what to do with only this disconnected sense that things are wrong.  Ultimately, I think what might be so appealing about clashes with the police is that they, at least for a moment, make a more general injustice a personal injustice and, sometimes, a question of the survival of a community, the individual lives of which one has have often abstracted into an abstract whole, into a matter of personal survival.  To me though, this connection or urgency feels purchased (Has a feeling of personal oppression and a lifestyle stemming from this become a purchaseable commodity like fast food or personal electronics?) and fleeting, but it is seductive.  For those lucky enough to be able to choose quite a deal of the landscape of their lives, choosing to do the right thing, and what exactly composes “the right thing” can seem terrible daunting.