purchasing oppression

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.