Words from prisoner of war Walter Bond: “Resist to Exist”

Resist to Exist

By Walter Bond

I am an anarchist.

I’m not the politically-correct hipster anarchist.

I am not the rhetorical anarchist either.

Reading dry accounts of the various factions of anarchism has never held much interest for me. I am an insurgent, an opposser. Why? Because I was born that way. When I was in kindergarten my teacher, Ms. Whirly, had a parent/teacher conference with my mom. I remember her saying something about me being a very bright young man but that I had serious problems with authority and one day it would get me in a lot of trouble. I do, and it did.

I came to find out that school doesn’t want you to be a ‘bright young man’. Serious questioning is the enemy of primary and secondary schools’ indoctrination of youth. While my grade school teachers prattled on and all the kids answered in unison, I sat at the back of the class reading about dinosaurs, mythology, and astronomy. It made me feel hopeful that places or times existed that were far from here. far from Iowa’s Aryan education. times and places where humans weren’t the center of the entire universe. Luckily my parents were far from conventional. My father was a half English, half Bohemian musician and my mom was a hot-tempered Puerto Rican that believed in the mystic powers of Earth, Animals, and Nature. My father’s father died in World War II fighting the Nazis and he always has a serious contempt for government as a result. He was also devotedly atheist and very anti-racist.

One thing I always loved about both my parents is they never cared to conform to the uppity idiocy of their immediate surroundings and they also allowed me to formulate my own opinions. No one in our house went to church, I didn’t have to get involved in little league or cub scouts or any of that. The only rule in our house was you learn to play an instrument. I chose drums. When I was 7-years old I learned “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton and the 50s hit “Johnny by Good.”  Music proved to be the love of my life. Music and resistance.

By age 10, my parents divorced and I was in Denver Colorado with my mom. We lived in a duplex with my aunt, her boyfriend, my Gramma and Grampa, 3 cousins, and a steady parade of family friends. Talk about culture shock! In any case I became close with my cousin Eric. He was 5 years older than me and lived in the basement. Eric did whatever he wanted and was largely ignored. He was the kid downstairs. Everytime a teenager came over with spiked hair or tattoos it was a quick hello and then down to the basement. Of course my aunt and mom didn’t want me to hang out down there. “Let the older kids be left alone” they would tell me but it was to no avail. The first time there was no adult supervision in the house, downstairs I went. It was the most amazing place my young eyes has ever beheld! On the old beat up record player was a band by the name of Dead Kennedys. It sounded like the Beach Boys on Ritalin! There was crazy banners and posters everywhere. Pentagrams, circle As, cryptic lettering. I was in love.

My cousin introduced me to his friends, all teenagers. But even though I was just a boy they didn’t mind me at all. On that day I figured out that I was an anarchist. Within a couple years I was playing drums with my cousin and his friends and was officially part of the Denver hardcore/metal/punk underground. I’m happy to say that the core group of kids that was to me like family never seriously changed, 20 years later we are still all irrevocably anarchist. Of course outside of that solid 5 of us everyone else came and went. But for us it was not a phase, we found bedrock.

By the 8th grade I refused to go to school. Although I still love to read and learn it’s a decision I never regretted. School for me felt like 8 hours a day of getting my soul murdered with boredom and chalkboards. I would much rather be skateboarding on private property or breaking things. But that was then and this is now. The only thing that’s really changed for me was the sureness that only comes with life experience. Now in my mid-thirties I realize  more than ever how much people and their governments suck. Systems of control everywhere you turn. Get married, have kids, buy a house, work for some evil corporation ’til you die, buy a car, buy a bigger car, watch t.v., get drunk, don’t think, just consume. No thanks, I’d rather eat a shotgun. I’d rather have a boyfriend and a girlfriend than a wife. I don’t have any kids cause most of ’em I meet act like loud mouth little drunk people. Besides nits become lice.

I didn’t buy a house cause it seems like a hassle and impossibility that the bank will ever let me own it. I have worked for some stupid places but in exchange or exploiting me for labor I stole everything I possibly could. So I broke even on that one. I didn’t learn to drive ’til I was 25 and even then it was very infrequent. What can I say, I’d rather ride.  I threw my t.v. in the trash years ago because I don’t like plastic rectangles or squared with technicolour trying to indoctrinate me with the hive mentality of a 10 Watt human existence. I don’t drink because alcohol turns people into slobbering, vomiting idiots! Honestly I don’t know, it just comes natural to me. I think back to the duldrum of the classroom or the evil of the slaughterhouses I’ve worked in and I’m reminded that things are not okay. I see Christian scumbags peddle their sanctimonious trite to the peoples of the world as if it were ‘the good news’ and I’m reminded that many people have shit for brains. I see the country of by birth wave its red, white, and blue murder rag as if it stood for more than anything short of genocide and used cars!

Then I look at the shackles on my own feet. The cuffs and black box digging into my wrists and the dinky confinements I’m kept in and I am reminded that cops, feds, jailers, judges, deputies, correctional officers and all their ilk are the agents of repression, the haters of true freedom, the enemies of social justice! The betrayers of the Earth, Animals and all life!

How can I remain defiant?

How can you remain complacent?!

I guess that’s just what’s in your nature. It’s a shame though, really it is. I won’t pretend I understand or even empathize, cause that would be a lie. I’m a wild animal myself and domestic breeds are largely a waste of my time. It’s a fact that this domesticated world hates the wild and free and it’s also true that many sheep like to run around in wolves clothing writing their little books admonishing people about the evils of civilization. Trying to motivate others to dismantle what they’re too cowardly to themselves.

Everyone likes to talk big, write big, and pose like they’re for real.

So few are, so don’t believe the hype.

And don’t believe anyone that can’t back up their talk. You’ll know a wolf by their teeth, not their howl. And I’m proud of that. All the traps and trials I face are worth it. All the persecutions and oppressions of my person, I won’t run from them. If I could go back to April 30th, 2010 and reconsider the arson that I’m now sitting in prison for, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Life is meant to be free. Not murdered, skinned and tanned then sold and perpetuated for profit. Life is meant to be defended, not subjugated.

This sick and twisted human supremacist culture does not dictate what’s right and wrong. Not for me, not ever. Western civilization has rivers of blood on it’s hands, I don’t. A good Christian-American patriot is partaking in one of the worst cultures and traditions of genocide in the history of the world! The only real crime of groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and Animal Liberation Front are challenging state sanctioned authority or having the courage to fight fire with fire. The only faith I have is that it won’t last forever. Oppression and power-madness sooner or later will implode.

Contrary to the capitalist or industrialized worldview, we live on a finite planet. We can only bleed the Earth so far before even our technology will not allow billions of people to breed endless minions of ever-fatter, ever lazier,  and ever-degenerated generations. My faith is that one day the Earth will flood and burn the human parasite off it’s back and if I have the great good fortune to witness even the beginning of that process. I will gleefully go down with the ship, laughing all the way. And honestly why should it be otherwise? You get out of things what you put in. So it should come as no surprise that when you build huge mechanized “civilizations” off of the blood and bones of suffering and murdered animals and the decimation of the natural world, that at the end of the day you will reap what you sow. How hard is it to comprehend that a fair and equitable society will never come from the rape, murder, and theft of its indigenous population, or the slavery and displacement of a race. As surely as 2 + 2 = 4, oppression + murder = self-destruction, whether by violent revolution or moral degradation.

Do I seem negative in my world view?

Do I come off as apocalyptic?

Perhaps. But I think I’m just being a realist. I fight for a moral, peaceful, and just world. That’s been what I’ve sacrificed much of my time, energy, and now my freedom for. But I do so because I’m optimistic. If humanity were on trial, the overwhelming evidence in the case would point to cruelty, subjugation, and greed. And on the other side would be a handful of actual freedom fighters whose caring and courageous stands throughout history get immediately co-opted by sign holders, petition signers and a bunch of feel good faddists.

Only now am I starting to truly see the writing on the wall, only now am I realizing how intuitive me and my friends were as little punk rock kids. The angst and passion we had is what makes real changes. The only reason it ever even fades is because we let it. So many people write off extremism as inherently flawed, but is it? A very real case could be made for extremism in the cause of liberation. It’s those that don’t compromise that the rest hold their comparisons up to. And it’s the militant that keep things on target when the others get distracted and forget their movements, their causes. How short sighted the compromises are, how forgetful of the acute wrongs are the welfarists and fair-weather activists. And in their lukewarm ideology they create forgetful movements of paper pushers and people pleasers. But its not an endless cycle that can rise and wane. It is a finite world as I said. And sooner or later we will reach the end of the line.

Greed and apathy will become played out to their inevitable end.

So now I sit in my prison cell and read about dinosaurs, mythology, and astronomy and I remain hopeful that not only have there been times and places free from menacing human hands but that, one way or the bloody other, there will be again.

Total liberation, whatever it may take!