Freedom meme

I’m delighted Sunni chose me as part of the tag team at the end of her answer to a freedom oriented meme. The meme is simple, involving only one question:

“What motivated you to start looking into Anarchist/Libertarian thought?”

As I’ve pondered the above question, part of the answer, as cheesy as it sounds, is “it’s always been a part of me from as far back in my memory as I can go.” One of my earliest memories is asking my mom why we had to use money, that if we had something someone else needed why not give it to them and they give us in return something we needed. She told me that was communism and we aren’t communists =). I think I blogged about that once but I’m not going to look for it now. I’ve always had an inkling that politics, and government in general, isn’t right or ethical. My mother is convinced if I had been an adult during the 60s I would have lived in a commune somewhere and been a flowerchild/demonstrator.

When my children were born, I declined a SSN for them and reluctantly conceded only when my ex and I could no longer receive a per child tax deduction on the yearly theft paperwork without it. If I knew then what I do now, I wouldn’t have done it. It’s been my standing practice that I don’t give out my SSN on almost all occasions it’s “requested,” long before identity theft became a household word. In fact, if I were more of an agitator or ghost, than a mole, I’d dump the whole mess completely.

As I aged, my political leanings were flexible to the moment and topic at hand. I tended to lean more to the R than the D, but I refused to declare a party loyalty, registering to vote as an independent.

Back to the question at hand: what is the most tangent series of events that brought me in contact with Anarchist/Libertarian thought and motivated me to take this line of thinking seriously? Well, it all began in the Fall of 1997 1998 (edit:I confused Tee’s age for a moment). Tee was in first grade and his cute, bubbly teacher kept going on and on about Outcome Based Education (OBE). The homework Tee would bring home, wrapped up in warm, fuzzy images and language, didn’t seem right to me. The few times I called a meeting with his teacher, to discuss my discomfort over the validity of the assignments, she’d prattle on about OBE.

Our household was newly wired to the internet, so I began to research what OBE was and did not like what I read at all. Also during this time period, the WASL test blabfest amped up, creeping in to every public school in Washington State. The WASLization of Washington students didn’t set well with me either.

In the quest to stem what I saw as a rising wave of putrid surveillance, pigeon holing and dumbing down that was meant for all society, I attended school board meetings to raise the alarm. I figured that clanging a danger bell might hinder the frog boiling tactics a little. In the process, I connected with a group of individuals who were of the same mind frame, although at different stages of epiphany. One of these fine folks, a refined, beautiful lady, introduced me to the concept of libertarianism. We’d discuss it often on the phone, via email and in person. She also loaned me a book that introduced me to a more anarchist/libertarian point of view. It was Claire Wolfe’s book 101 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution.

Reading that book was an “A HA” moment in my life. I poured over the pages and realized I’d found my niche. I wasn’t just quirky, or paranoid, or plain weird. That funky smell wasn’t my imagination, but the rotting feces clinging to the bottom of the nation’s shoes. And I had choices, ones I hadn’t been smart enough to conceptualize on my own, in my state of near aloneness.

So, that’s the story of how I got from there to here!

To continue the memage, I’ll take Sunni’s lead and tag three bloggers as I’d like to read their answers to the question at hand, if they’d like to play along. I pick Taran, B.W., and Jed.