Anger management

When I was four years old and the miners' strike was in full swing my mum took me to Leo's Co-op supermarket on Park Road in Liverpool. I went past there today which reminded me. I used to stand outside with a bucket shaking it wildly and asking passers-by to drop coins in it to "Support the miners and their families".

When my mother opposed the 1st Gulf war I went with her on the demonstration, aged 10. I wrote a banner saying "I won't die in Saddam's war" and then I affixed a badge I'd bought from an anarchists stall at a hippy fair near Keswick which said "Stuff the Poll Tax up Thatcher's Arse".

When my government was happily letting my school buildings fall apart around mine and my friends ears, and when nearly half the people who left my school, and the school where my mum taught ended up unemployed...I joined a political party and I campaigned to change the government.

I know a lot of people who did the same. It is also pleasing to note that none of them has ever been "disappeared" or "interogated by police" or generally intimidated into not campaigning to change the government.

There has in fact in that time been at least one such change nationally, and one change of local government where I live too. Niether involved violence. In fact the power went to the people with the most votes. I campaigned in favour of one and against the other. ("campaign" here being a generic term for peaceful means of encouraging one's fellow citizens to take a view similar to yours, and to act on it)

It never occurred to me that the accepted and recommended response to things you disagreed with was to attempt to blow things up (including oneself). But now I know.