I saw some Anarchists yesterday.

This whole May Day thing is totally and completely new to me. Sure I always knew about the Maypoles and the dancing. “April showers bring May flowers,” I am always happy to repeat to anyone who’s willing to listen to me during a Spring rain (though I am not sure anyone appreciates that phrase as much as I do, being that I myself was born on the 6th, and am therefore granted the legal status of a “May flower”). So I just figured it was some old Puritan festival where maidens got to wear fertility symbols in their hair and have a good time around other, overly phallic, symbols.

When did it all go Communist? Apparently May Day is now a day of chaos. Apparently workers of the world are supposed to unite on this day every year, demonstrating in the streets in as many numbers as they can come up with. People of all kinds of leftist ways of thinking are meant to flood into the street, just to remind those in power exactly who they’re supposed to be paying attention to, in case they haven’t seen the polls lately. In Russia, France, Latin America, Spain, and the Middle East (I assume– they’re always out in the streets there, rightfully protesting something), it’s a day to grab your signs, grab your flags, go out into the streets, and appear in front of television cameras shouting whatever foreign language slogan the organizers have decided will play well in the living rooms of the watching class.

And in America, this year at least, things are no different. Immigration is in the air, and people are realizing, as they seem to do every few years, that there are a lot of people in this country who weren’t necessarily sent an invitation to be here. Sure, as long as life is a party and they’re willing to pick up the place a little bit while they’re here, everyone’s willing to tolerate them. But now it’s like it’s 3 a.m., the beer’s run out, and people are noticing that guy pulling Heinekens out of the fridge doesn’t actually know anyone here. Maybe he doesn’t belong at the party after all.

So the question becomes– amnesty or enforcement? No one’s heartless enough to send them all home, are they? Just to make sure, our streets are flooded with those who don’t have IDs and those in solidarity. In Chicago, where I was, it was protesting as usual– police in riot gear cordoned off designated areas, and people had their say into those ubiquitious TV cameras as police department choppers hovered overhead.

This is the last thing I’ll say about immigration: we have a big problem. America made a big promise that not all Americans seem to be willing to keep. I’m not smart enough to figure out a solution, but, like usual in this country, we find ourselves cleaning up messes the rest of us made years ago. Here’s hoping the broom isn’t so big we can’t lift it anymore.

Anyway, immigrants weren’t the only ones out there. I stepped out of work to grab a soda and a snack, and on my way to the White Hen, that’s when I saw the Anarchists.

There weren’t very many of them– couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. Mostly kids, long hair, wearing black. Mostly guys, although there were a few pierced, black-haired girls with them. I have to admit, I’m getting old. My first thought was whether they should be in school or not, but it was after four in the afternoon, so I guess they were OK on that one.

A few of them had drums, and were making a racket (see, there’s the oldie in me sneaking in again). Most of them had red flags marked with the A for Anarchy (as seen upside down in the V for Vendetta). They were marching in a group down a one way street, but here’s the thing that made me think twice about them: they were marching right down the middle of the street.

They weren’t in any designated protest zones. As far as I could tell, they weren’t doing anything they were supposed to be designated to do at all. It was a one-way street, and they were hiking right down the middle of it. Cars slowed and turned around them. They were blocking traffic, marching in between two lanes, as cars spun frustrated around them. There was a surprising lack of honking– maybe people, knowing more about May Day than I did, understood why they were there.

I didn’t. I shook my head and seriously thought they were going to get arrested. I watched them for a few minutes, and then turned away to grab my soda and snack. After I got back into my office, I asked my co-workers if they’d heard the drums. They said they had, and I told them it had been the Anarchists.

Now, strangely enough, this was not my first protest experience in Chicago. I’ve seen anti-war protests downtown before. I’ve seen our local bike collaborative riding around on their monthly masses more than once, fighting with the cops over where bikes are and aren’t allowed. And every time I’ve seen protesters on Chicago’s streets, they’ve all been much more like the immigration protests– confined, watched, and condoned (if not endorsed) by police.

Which means the Anarchists were really doing something they weren’t supposed to. Sure, they were just kids. And sure, I don’t really think for a second that they were really advocating Anarchy. At least not in the blood in the streets, kill the police, break all the laws kind of way that the really hardcore Anarchists mean it.

So I kind of brushed them off as lunatics. They could have gotten hurt out there. They could have really gotten arrested for not playing along in the protest game.

But May Day was something else in America, besides a day for Anarchists, immigrants, and Reds to take to the streets. It was, as declared by our Decider in Chief, Loyalty Day.

That’s right, Caesar Bushus signed a proclamation and everything. He declared May 1st Loyalty Day in the United States. He said that in appreciation of our government, we should proudly display the stars and stripes (as so many immigrants were doing, with a completely different message), and spend some time thinking about how loyal we were to this great government that served us so well.

Seriously. I am not making that up. Loyalty Day. While Communists were protesting and immigrants were screaming in our streets, Bush wanted us to declare our loyalty to a government that hasn’t done much more than lie to us and screw us over for the past few years.

And so I have to take back what I thought about the Anarchists. I was worried that, because they were protesting outside of a designated area, that they would get arrested. I was worried that because they were arrested as teenagers, they would have trouble getting into a good school. That they would have trouble working their way up into our American system, a system that asks for loyalty and yet seems to give none. I was worried that they’d get in trouble for protesting a system that, err, needed protesting.

I shouldn’t have worried.

I should have joined them. I should have marched right out into that street with them, and protested outside of designated areas, and gotten arrested if necessary. I should have shown my loyalty on Loyalty Day– a loyalty to human decency and the voice of the people, and honor, and justice, and everything this government is against. Those kids did the most subversive thing I’d seen all week, and you remember what Stephen Colbert did last Saturday.

I’m not advocating blood in the streets, as I said. I still kind of hope those kids didn’t get arrested, because they’re exactly the kind of kids we need to stay out of jail and become registered voters, if not elected officials. But after hearing about Loyalty Day, I’m thinking a little more Anarchy in this country wouldn’t hurt anybody. Designated protesting is great, and the immigrants sure got the attention they needed.

But maybe we all need to do a little more walking down the middle of the street.