One of the escapees dove under a car just beside us. Her gasping was so loud that we could hear it over the buzz of the passing mopeds.
One of the cops waved his pistol at us. “You don’t see this,” he called. Then he sped off.
“Halt,” echoed an amplified voice from the far end of the alley, “you’re all under arrest!”
Then there came the dismal mutter of capture, the gear-grinding approach of a small black schoolbus with bars welded across the windows, the quick disappearance of the little band of the desperate.
Then silence. Not a window opened in any of the houses that lined the alley, not a curious face appeared. We kept to the dim interior of the carport, listening to the breathing of the person under the car. We stayed like that for some little time. Once somebody came out of the La Mirada, got into a gleaming blue Consensus, and drove away.
“It’s quiet,” Jim said at last. “You can come out now.”
We then had our only contact with the Conspiracy of Angels, and learned a little more about the nature of Destructuralism.
A Statement by an Anonymous Member of the Conspiracy of Angels
People cannot continue to hide from the fact that this civilization is totally bankrupt. Society needs a whole new way of doing and being if we are not going to build up all over again and wind up with an even worse war.
That is where the Destructuralist Movement comes in, and the Angels are militant Destructuralists.
What is Destructuralism, you might ask, and what’s in it for me and my family? First off, Destructuralism says that your person and those you make your family are the only valid social unit, and the maintenance of that family is the only valid economic activity.
We say that the whole social edifice, from the Boy Scouts right up to the Army, is essentially an addiction, that it is more than unnecessary, it is dangerous. Social structures are the breeding ground of ideology, greed, and territorialism. Agricultural communities are peaceful communities, and families bound together by need and love do not go to war.
No matter how benign a given structure seems, it will inevitably lead to the same consequences all social structures lead to, namely, war and death. Real social harmony comes not from law-books but from the human heart.
If that is too high an ideal, then it is perfectly obvious that we are eternally condemned to the slavery of warfare, and probably also to extinction.
Government is institutionalized dehumanization. People who deal with paper instead of other people lose the all-important thread of contact from heart to heart. Here’s a story about a social structure that all of America loves, the British Relief. A man who joined our movement got eye cancer and the Relief did triage on him and sent him home. People wait in line for days, only to be told by some English nanny that they can’t even get an aspirin. And if you go black market for medicine and get caught, it is not a jury of your peers that tries you, it is the Relief. And they forced you onto the black market in the first place. This man with eye cancer bought black-market chemotherapy, got caught, and had to pay a fine, even though he was dying.
He became an Angel a month before he took henbane from a witch. He did not die of cancer, he died of structure, or at least suffered from it. There is no shortage of painkillers, for example. The Relief could have given him Brompton Mixture on an outpatient basis, but the rules reserve it for inpatients only, and he couldn’t be an inpatient because he was triaged!
So the structure—simply because it was there—at the very least condemned him to unnecessary agony. If his family had been in control of his fate, instead of some bureaucrat in the Relief office down at the civic center, he would have been spared the torment and indignity of the pain.
People say thank God Europe didn’t get in the war, what would we do without them, but the Angels say we are just suffering more because of the structures that are now being imposed on us from the outside. When Washington was destroyed, we had a golden, historic opportunity to free ourselves from the age-old slavery of government. Instead, we are having both economic and political structure imposed on us from the outside—colonial exploitation, as a matter of fact, very similar to what the Europeans practiced on the Chinese in the last century. The foreign presence on our shores is nothing more than a prescription for more structural enslavement, with the added problem that we don’t even control the structure.
Also, they take crops from the few viable growing areas and allocate them not only to North America but also to themselves. Remember, if we weren’t feeding Europe too, we wouldn’t be starving ourselves. The story is that they have gone into Argentina and taken it over to make sure the crops are not held up for high prices. Argentina is no longer even a country. If you read the English papers, they always call it “the Argentine” or some such thing. We believe that most of the population south of the border is dead of starvation, and the Europeans caused it by taking the only food our Latin sisters and brothers could get their hands on, the Argentine wheat. That is hundreds of millions of deaths.
We call ourselves Angels because we help people in need and because we remember the dishonored dead of the world, those who died on Warday in the United States and the USSR, and the billions who have died since. We represent the living, the ordinary men and women and children who see that, in order to survive, mankind needs a whole new way of being.
There is inherent in Destructuralism the concept that people can remake their own hearts to include a new valuation of their fellow human beings. By refocusing our energies on our families we can learn never to forget for an instant how it feels to be the other person. For example, the American President and the Russian Premier could not have done what they did to the rest of us on Warday if they had been trained from birth never to forget for an instant that all human beings are partners in life and that everybody is as important to himself or herself as they were to themselves—that the death of the average Joe was going to be as much of a catastrophe for him and his family as the death of the great leader would be to his own precious self and his relatives. Instead, they sat in their command posts and talked numbers. To Destructuralists there are no numbers, there are only names and faces and hearts.
Only in a truly destructured, rehumanized social milieu can the kind of maturing growth that people need take place, because only if there are no distancing structures can the individual come to realize, through his identification with his own family, that every other life on earth is as precious and valuable as his own.
You might argue that Destructuralism is old-style anarchy all over again, but it isn’t. Destructuralism is based on the caring of mature human souls for one another and for the planetary body, too. It is government by putting yourself in the other man’s shoes.
The bible said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
That is all the government the world needs.
Remember this: If you love life and think that big government is big poison, and you are willing to stand hand in hand with your brothers and sisters on this earth, do not scorn the Angels, for you are one.
Fugitives
As soon as she finished her statement, our friendly Angel got into the nearest American-made car, reached under the dashboard, and hotwired it.
“You want a ride?”
We didn’t. We just wanted to disappear. She backed out into the alley and was soon off down La Mirada. Not ten seconds after the car had disappeared, there came a roar from about thirty feet overhead and an ultralight aircraft darted past in the direction she had gone. There are large numbers of these planes in Los Angeles skies, used by police and fire departments to keep detailed tabs on rooftops and backyards. Soon, more of the moped cops shot past on La Mirada.