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.
Did I miss something? How do you know that “none of the people around her” including her family, cared enough about her to try to ensure her safety. Last year, I lost a good friend that pleaded with to see a doctor when I suspected that he was more sick than he realized. People often do what they want to do and sometimes they don’t heed the advice or warnings of concerned friends and family. It seems presumptuous of you to declare from afar, that you know that no one tried to dissuade her. It might make for a good story, but I don’t believe you have a sound basis for making this claim.
You’re kidding right? Read her memorial page, read the tributes to her on Infoshop. All of her fellow anarchists are planning to make similar trips in honor of her.
Are you saying it wasn’t niave of her to meet strangers in the 9th Ward? Are you saying instead that people warned her not to do that and she stubbornlly did it anyway?
I say nonsense. No one bothered to teach Kirsten the street smarts she needed to travel through one of the world’s most dangerous cities and the people who glibly applauded her lack of knowledge of how the world really works are in part to blame for her and the thousands of people just like her who are victimized every year.
We as a society are failing our children time and again, sending them off into the world with fanciful notions of non-violence and the essential goodness of “the oppressed” and the solidarity of the workers. The truth is that there are monsters out there, human monsters who are waiting for young people to cross their path unprepared to face evil.
Jefferey Duncan raped his first victim when he was 12 and his victim was five. After being tried for the murder of the Grone family it is suspected he kidnapped, raped and killed at least three other children and probably more.
Ted Bundy preyed upon naive women who accepted his kindness, and Jeffery Dahmer used young men’s reckless trust against them. The world is full to brimming with people who will do far worse than they did to you if given the opportunity.
The people around her never taught her that, or she wouldn’t have met a stranger late at night in the 9th Ward. Don’t blame Kirsten for being naive, blame her teachers and parents and all those activist friends of hers for encouraging her to be so.
But more importantly, let’s stop allowing people to go through life unaware of how to protect themselves from criminals.
Growing up in New Orleans we all knew the danger of some of the streets. I would of being scare to death to be alone hoping to find a good hart on some of those streets….. It is sad that she didn’t take any precautions so she could be safe..We do have good and bad every where but sometimes you can temp your luck too much…. The streets of New Orleans have being and are dangerous for anyone, people just need to read or watch news, it is a violent city…. Thanks for posting this one even though I read a lot about N.O. I missed this sad story…..she was too young R.I.P.
new orleans has its violence; this is true. but the community here is strong, and the city is full of goodness and beauty, too. i hate that someone murdered kirsten. i hope this won’t deter others with optimistic hearts from coming to this city. we need you. we really need you.
I went to school with this chick but only remember her vaguely but i know what type of person she was. While I am not saying she deserved to do or anything I do remember thinking ” why in the hell was she riding a bike through the 9th ward.” If the locals are scared then visitors need to be as well.
It is my understanding that Kirsten did not ride around the 9th Ward on her bicycle. She was heading the other direction, trying to get back to where she was staying. The fact that she was found 7 hours later in the 9th Ward indicates abduction. Honestly she was not stupid enough to ride around the 9th Ward at 1:30 in the morning. The only mistake she made was being alone (although from what I’ve heard about NO, even if someone was with her the same thing may have happened).
But she told people that’s what she was doing. Read the article I link to.
The mistake she made was to ride through the country trusting random people to take care of her, and that her supposed family friends nver taught her that that was unsafe is outrageous.
I new kirsen.I dont like the tone of your article.She fed me when i had no food let me crash when i had no home.Bottom line you get killed anywhere.I think your article smacks of racism.But i do agree with you that i wish she had a weapon.The thing is just very unsettling.
I’m Black moron.
I visit Metairie/New Orleans about 3 months out of the year, and anyone in doubt of this city’s casual violence needs to be aware before coming here. There are beautiful places in the city, but this is not the place to nourish a belief in utopian ideals or the basic goodness of humanity. A DEA agent visiting the city for a conference was beaten during a robbery and died of his injuries the same year Brydum was killed. Be concerned for the people who are forced by economic circumstance to live in the 9th ward or to have to go to or go home after work in these neighborhoods at night. A bartender leaving her job was killed downtown in 2009.
While I admire Brydum’s social concern and compassion for the poor, I can’t glorify in poverty or slum dwelling, because I grew up severely poor and am all too aware of the stress and the violence that often comes with it. I can’t support the thinking that it’s an adventure, for a young woman alone, to casually pedal her bike at 1:30 am in a not so great area of a city overwhelmed with robbery and murder. Did she have any idea that the latter part of her route did take her through a neighborhood that’s dangerous? Did she ever research the city online, and read about the neighborhood she would be staying in?
Yes, she may have still been assaulted had she been with a friend — but her chances of being abducted, or even attacked, would have been less had she not been alone, or even got a ride home or attempted to get a cab to take her to her location. For all we know she was stalked as she left the Howlin’ Wolf.
Black criminals prefer white victims. We all know its true but few have the balls to admit that out loud.
Ironically this is largely due tot he class and race warfare rhetoric spread by White urban liberals in the schools and media, who make up the majority of the victims.