Late in September 25-year-old Kirsten Brydum from San Francisco was murdered in the 9th Ward New Orleans while traveling the country seeking to preach the gospel of Collective Autonomy. She was a popular San Francisco activist whose friends encouraged her to make what they apparently didn’t know was an extremely dangerous bike trip around America in which she would live the anarchist principles she preached and rely on the idea of, in her words, “collectivizing our energy and resources” to achieve self-sufficiency “thorough cooperation” to meet her basic needs.

Most of us refer to that high minded concept as relying on the kindness of strangers.

Anyone who has grown up or lived in a rough area knows such supposed largess is in short supply in the inner cities many of us have called home. Perhaps for those who have come of age in the last decade and a half, when crime was contained and American prosperity and culture allowed for the development of largely violent crime free communities, the idea that a lone idealist working to change the world would be targeted by the very people they arrogantly assume they’re going to “save” from oppression is unthinkable. In their sheltered world they assume poor people, minorities and the rest of the “oppressed’ will recognize them as allies and act accordingly.

This sort of naive vision has consequences especially in the inability of people who hold such views to recognize dangerous situations:

In Manhattan, she spent a long time examining trash bins, marveling at the useable stuff that New Yorkers threw away. In St. Paul, Minn., she marched in protests outside the Republican National Convention. In Philadelphia, she visited an urban farm and talked to housing activists. A week ago, she got on a train to Louisiana.

“Right now I’m rolling into New Orleans,” she wrote last Thursday on her blog. “I really don’t know what to expect. An old friend of a new friend offered to pick me up from the station and get me to the house of another friend of a friend. The sun is setting on the bayou-licked lands and I am truly fortunate.”

That was the last any of her friends was to hear from her. Two days later, her body was found on a sidewalk in a tough section of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, about 3 miles northeast of the French Quarter.

An old friend of a new friend is otherwise known as a stranger. Her “new friend” set her up and she was robbed and murdered because none of the people around her, not her friends, not her family, not her admirers or her fellow travelers in her movement, cared enough about her to try to ensure that she took basic precautions to safeguard herself. Her entire circle of friends, all the people in the world she thought cared about her, failed her. Admittedly it was not malicious on their part but their pretensions of activism, their fantasy lives built around an image of themselves as the kind of people criminals would embrace as sisters and brothers out of respect for their idealism, is at the core of Kirsten’s inability to judge the kind of set up that a street wise 10-year-old could avoid.

And therein lies the problem with the Kirsten Brydums of the world. Their head is so full of armchair revolutionary nonsense about taking to the streets learned from their suburban dwelling college professors and compatriots that they never bother to learn about the streets themselves. I learned the hard way, growing up in Essex County in New Jersey, what a set up looked like but more importantly I learned that there were always people in waiting for you to drop your guard so they could at the very least rob you. If you’re caught “slippin'” then you’re going to “get got” as they used to say. Kirsten and her friends are slippin’ and they seem to have no idea that people are waiting in the wings for them.

Xavier at Xavier’s Thoughts put it best:

One of Kristen Brydum’s friends described her as savy, adept at defusing situations. If your attacker is willing to kill you to prevent a witness to the theft of your bicycle, the only way to “defuse” the situation is through the threat or the application of deadly force. By the time her journey reached that point, a gun would only have saved her if she had the willingness to use it.

Somehow I think that those who knew and loved Kristen Brydum would have tried to prevent this journey to the 9th Ward of New Orleans if they had known of the dangers. The dangers are there. Waiting. They are real. A wise person has an appreciation of those dangers. I would not travel there at 1:30PM on a bike myself, and I am a large man with a gun. It is not because of fear that I would not travel there, but rather because I recognize the dangers and realize my own mortality.

It was not the lack of a weapon that doomed Kristen Brydum. It was the lack of appreciation of the hazards that she repeatedly injected her life into. She lived on the edge, and she paid for it with her life. She espoused “anarchist economics,” the sharing of wealth in a “gift market.” The true sociopathic anarchists of New Orleans discovered her, disregarded her pleas for mercy, and killed her for her bicycle and her wallet. An innocent, easily preventable death occurred not because the world is a bad, mean and unforgiving place, but because the victim ignored the fact that some human predators are.

I’m not one to blame the victim of a crime and I frankly am glad there are people who get a chance to grow up without the hard lessons of the streets. But a 25-year-old woman should have, in some part of her education, learned the basic lessons of how to keep herself safe. Our schools failed her, as did the anarchist movement she helped to create and the people around her that knew better. Kirsten Brydum was caught slippin’ and was treated just like anyone else in the 9th Ward in that situation, her ideals, her good intentions and her anarchist street cred were useless when some stranger she didn’t know decided he wanted her money and her bike, and didn’t want to risk doing time by leaving a witness.

Kirsten didn’t have to die. Someone could have traveled with her, someone could have taught her how to defend herself. Someone could have stopped her before she got to the 9th Ward and told her what the streets were really like. But her so called friends were too busy building up their own reputations as “free thinkers” and radicals to take one second out their day to think about whether or not an unsavvy White woman from San Francisco was out of her depth bicycling through in a city where there’s a thousand ways to die, and most involve trusting a stranger.