anarchists are blockheads

My job is of a very heroic type. Some heroes rescue infants from burning buildings. Some heroes arrest Nazis in Argentina. Some heroes punch Great White sharks right in the eye.

Me? Well, I empty trash cans and (try to) get rid of anarchist graffiti.

Yesterday at my janitorial job, we got a call that there was some grafitti on the outside of the building. My valiant custodial comrade and I emerged into the morning sunshine armed with nothing more than our audacity and some grafitti removing wipes.

The vandals used some kind of thick latex paint, so we couldn't actually get the paint off the wall, but I was really struck by what they scrawled in large letters:

NO LIMITS, NO LAWS

Next to it, they had put one of those funny anarchist A's.

I immediately thought, "No limits? Really?"

"NO LIMITS" sounds like a pretty limiting statement to me. They chose to write in English and not in any other real or imaginary language. That's a pretty narrow and limited thing to do. And it seems that by using a paintbrush instead of a catfish to paint, they were voluntarily submitting to some kind of limit.

I've just finished reading GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, which is maybe why I've been thinking more about anarchists lately. On the surface, the short novel is about anarchists who want to take down the government, but who Chesterton is really critisizing are the anarchists who want to take down God.

"NO LIMITS, NO LAWS" seems a pretty foolish thing to believe, and an even more sophomoric thing to write on the outside of a building.