Panic!? Attack!?

Panic!?

Act for freedom NOW!
An overwhelming sense of urgency.
Above acting freely, your actions must be topical, and timely.
Anarchist action seems overburdened by a tacit deadline.
Each turn of the media cycle dictating the window of opportunity,
subject to a volatile public interest, fickle attention spans,
and memories as short as their imaginations.
Narrow time frames limit the horizons of possibility.
Forgoing depth of thought in favor of knee-jerk reactions.
Time stress induces burnout, time pressure induces blunders.
Forgotten is the anti-spectacular critique that leisurely bides its time,
and the anarchist urge to kill time, having the time of our lives.
Letting motives and consequences be afterthought,
so long you as act with haste.
So long as your attacks exfoliate infrastructure,
hastening its repair and modernization.
But if you sit idly, a litany of motives make their nagging appeal.
So long as you are unhappy, uneasy, unsettled.
Your inability to stop ecocide is expiated by eco-anxiety.[1]
Your inability to stop genocide is expiated by survivor’s guilt.[2]
Time has run out already many times before.
If a fight already lost is not a reason to surrender:
Why surrender to this affect and not another?

Attack!?

An unrelenting call of duty.
Explosive attacks and bombastic communiques,
a rhetorical stirring of passions
contrasts with the stillness of a sea of passivity.
Propaganda of the deed seeks to jar you out of your apathy.
As if giving a fuck would impede impending cataclysms.
Emotional appeal, manipulation, and blackmail.
Morality expects your actions and hostility as sacrifice.
If that doesn’t sound so nice, maybe one of its guises will suffice.
Is it now instead an ethics, a set of deeply-held values and convictions,
or a set of strong aesthetic preferences and passions?
More insidiously, is it disguised as arbitrary metrics of effectiveness
to guide avowedly amoral actions towards a revolutionary goal?
Machiavellian machinations predicating self-renunciation,
delayed gratification, and the ultimate sacrifice for a utopian horizon.
Instead of that, it is a fear of mortality--
of weakness, of lack of status, of irrelevance, of aging.
The inability to bear the dread of ill fate with grace.
A legacy of destruction seeks remembrance.
Seeking immortality via immolation, notoriety, or martyrdom.
Life-denying affirmation of a will.
Looking under rocks for lost causes to die for
hungry, cold, alone, and far away from home.
Like a shooting star burnt rapidly into a pebble
sending a ripple across a tepid milieu.
One could think of better things to do
than blowing up inside a dingy bureau.[3]

Live freely & let evil live.

Lone wolves would not be so lonely
if they were as selfless and generous
with their affection, as with their aggression.
If they loved with the same reckless abandon
as they lash out against an uncaring world.[4]

Terrorists paint the world in the drab palette of fear and dread
with mutilated screams, dismembered bodies, and rubble.
The holy war on terror feeds back off the panic they instill.
Integral to the loop, moral crusaders seeking to vanquish evil.

The part not said out loud about tolerating difference,
about abolishing policing, incarceration, and extermination:
No one will account for the disproportional indiscriminate hostilities
beyond the strictures of morality, and the excesses of lives without measure.
Good intentions fail against everyday cruelty and neglect.

In a planet rife with authoritarians, industrialists, capitalists,
and all sorts of bigots, fascists creep and they live among us,
free to run rampant and wreak havoc unless opposed.
Perhaps it's best they are evaded when possible,
lest opposition become a full-time job.
Only death could provide a release,
duty-bound until all are free.

Hate Watch binge hate-watches hate crimes
a calendar full of counterdemos.
Protests are mediated, counterprotests doubly so.
Demonstrations are at best self expression and catharsis.
Counterdemos are at their base shouting matches
that may escalate into street fights.

Love is an afterthought,
after the world is first split into hated enemies
the remainder affiliating according to affinity,
the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Neglected souls huddled for warmth
in the cold barracks of a common struggle.

When does organized self defense become
do-gooders persecuting of wrongdoers
right-thinkers persecuting wrongthink?
Moral entrepreneurs enforcing conformity to norms and punishing deviants.
Though many a thing maybe be cause for concern,
when has panic been of aid in addressing them?
When has freedom benefited from moral panics?
Witch hunts turn free spirits into folk devils
scapegoats used to fearmonger.

An anarchist is not a paragon of truth and virtue.
An anarchist lives freely and lets evil live.
A lived tension without haste for release.

May you be a survivor, not a spent bullet casing, or a warmonger.
May fear and hatred never cloud your motives and steal your initiative.
May a sense of duty or moral calculus never lead to sacrifice again.
May attack and revenge only exist as self indulgence, never as self renunciation.
May a sense of urgency never mess with your own timing and sense of rhythm.
May your pursuits be for their own sake, never in the service of panic.

For words and deeds of different kinds
beyond the flattened realm of text and tactics.
May you spend less chastising those you hate,
than lavishing those you love.

[1] ‘Desert’ <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert>

[2] ‘Blessed is the Flame’ <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/serafinski-blessed-is-the-flame>

[3] ‘Thinking about Mikhail Zhlobitsky’ <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mikola-dziadok-thinking-about-mikhail-zhlobitsky>

But also Mauricio Morales and many others.

While words are not enough to dissuade those who have chosen death, often anarchist rhetoric opts to give the final push, rather than hold them back. As if to say, the problem is not self-sacrifice, but that not enough people are doing it.

[4] <https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/new-study-reveals-nasas-roman-could-find-400-earth-mass-rogue-planets/>

“We estimate that our galaxy is home to 20 times more rogue planets than stars – trillions of worlds wandering alone.” As above, so below; our anarchist galaxy is home to more unknown passersby, vagabonds, hermits, and recluses, than those few who burned brightly, and those whose lives revolve around them.