Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

There was a stoplight at the main access point to this highway, and we took advantage of it to get onto it in a mass, blocking both lanes; had there not been a stoplight, it would have been extremely dangerous to get on the highway with cars speeding at us from behind. As it was, we were on the area's main artery at rush hour, blocking it entirely and moving at a snail's pace. A vast line of cars immediately backed up behind us, some stoically accepting the inconvenient consequences of living in a Hberal community while others leaned on their horns and screamed. The police, strangely, were nowhere to be seen yet.

Over the following minutes, things became more and more tense at the back of our group, as a couple of particularly belligerent motorists exchanged threats and recriminations with the similarly hotheaded bicyclists bearing the banner. Suddenly, as the next exit appeared in the distance ahead of us, there was a commotion at the back of our party, followed by a screeching of wheels. Two SUVs drove right into the middle of our group. People leaped out of the way in terror as the vehicles swerved unpredictably. The one in firont struck one of us from the side, knocking him off his bicycle, and then bore down directly on a volunteer at our local bicycle repair collective. He leaped from his bicycle at the last instant, out of the way of the SUV, which plowed right over the bicycle, catching it and dragging it forward in a stream of sparks. A split second later, the thud of crunching glass rang out; the back windows of the SUV had been broken with bicycle U-Bicvcle Parades locks. The vehicle swerved again, pulling up crazily on the grass median in the middle 104 of the highway, and zoomed off down the exit ramp, followed by the other SUV

It was all over in a few seconds, but it took several more for us to take stock of what had happened. The injuries of the person who had been struck were minor, but his bicycle was unrideable and the other one had been reduced to a twisted hunk of roadldlled metal. Dragging these, and providing emotional and physical support to the ones who had nearly been run over, we made our way even more slowly to the off-ramp. There, at the bottom of it, we saw the two SUVs stopped, along with a few police cars.

We paused at the side of the highway to figure out what to do, permitting the rest of the traffic to pass us. All the drivers that had waited behind us and seen what had happened now waved, cheered, honked, even made hand gestures signifying "peace" or "victory"?^fhey had witnessed the brutish behavior of the first two drivers, and it had won us their sympathy and support.

We made a few mistakes at this point. We were in a vulnerable position, and needed to decide quickly what to do, but in our confusion and lack of organization, we bogged down trying to make a group decision while a couple of us went to speak to the police. The kids from out of town, feeling at risk and fearing police surveillance now that a crime had arguably been committed, decided after a couple of minutes to ride ahead along the side of the highway to the next exit and make their getaway from there; this they succeeded in doing without complications. Some really foolish questions were asked by inexperienced people vidth no sense of security culture (see Security Culture, pg. 461?please!) about who had broken the windows of the SUV, but these questions were swiftly dismissed. It came out that the bicycle that had been destroyed had been a free one from the local bicycle collective (see preceding Bicycle CoHectiues, too!), so the main cost to us was in shock.

Meanwhile, the report from the police was that though the murderous SUV driver had announced that he wanted to press charges, he had come across even to the police officers as such a dangerous lunatic that for the time being they were simply concentrat- Bicvde Parades ing on keeping him and us separated. We took advantage of this confusion to make our 105

way back into town, and finally stopped to discuss the situation. Some of us wanted to press charges against the drivers, while others doubted that the legal system could ever be used to our advantage; no charges were ever filed from either side, as it turned out.