Over this past week, I’ve been walking through a neighborhood in a city with a centuries-long history of antisemitism (as in hatred of all things Jewish/Judaism), among other deadly “isms.” The ghosts crowd-out the present-day populace on my strolls. So when I stumbled on some street art that I thought was “against antisemitism,” as it claimed, my heart leaped. I shared an image of it with some Jewish anarchist friends, and they observed, correctly, that the sticker was targeted against Jews who have no love for nationalism or statism, including a version based on zionism; it had been pasted over a Yiddish-language sticker asserting instead “doikayt” (hereness), a no-borders sentiment about making home with others wherever we diasporic rad Jews find ourselves. Suddenly, I wished that I could “unsee” the sticker-on-sticker in this neighborhood that time and again, saw the policing, displacing, and even extermination of Jews.

Which got me thinking re: my theme this week: #FTP, #Fuck12, and so on (as a way to use some of my too-many photos of street art proclaiming such abolitionist views).

What would some “intelligent life” that arrived on our imperiled earth many centuries from now think of the folly of the currently rather unintelligent, as a whole, species called humans when it stumbled on our remaining street art symbols? Particularly if almost no human beings remained to offer insight into our weird ways: that people actually devised something called “police” and thought it was a good (aka life-giving) idea.

Maybe, if we and they are lucky in the intervening years, policing as an institution+concept will have been abolished—and generations after would slowly but surely lose all sense of “cops.” (Of course, police abolition goes hand in hand with the abolition of all forms of hierarchy.) Perhaps if their feet brought them to an #ACAB and #1312, they were furl their brows, if they had them, and smile at the many wordplays they could share with each other: “always carry a critter,” “all constellations are beautiful,” “all crustacean are abundance,” etc.

One can hope. And meanwhile, keep walking in that direction.

(photo: my feet finding tags, Athens 2025)