Anarchy At KU!

You are a phantom, a heroine, a soldier, a pillar of your community. Rock on!-- from the DIY "How To" Guide section on how to create 40-foot inflatable teddy bears.

The sun beat down on a scruffy, slight guy pedaling a hydrant-yellow bike up a hill. In the pocket of his ragged button-down shirt, a walkie-talkie crackled. Sweat fogged his glasses as small trucks trundled past him up the busy four-lane street. He spotted about ten cops standing off under some trees and radioed back the officers' number and location to his friends.

A small crowd had collected in Lawrence's Centennial Park to rally before a march up McDonald Drive. The protesters anticipated conflicts with the national security officials who would likely be protecting the Holiday Inn's Holidome, where guests like National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice would be joining former Kansas Senator Bob Dole and his wife, Elizabeth (now a senator from North Carolina), for a $500-a-plate dinner. There, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani would receive the Dole Spirit of Leadership Award for his post-September 11 efforts. The dinner was the first event of the four-day dedication of the $11 million Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics on the University of Kansas campus. The rabble in the park was enraged by the institute's existence.

Upset that only seventy people had showed up to protest, Dave Strano stalked off to fill up his military canteen. "It's really sweet when people don't give a shit 'cause they're all white folks who live in a First World country," he mumbled to a friend. Then he climbed onto a bench to address the group.

The expensive dinner and the millions spent on building the Dole center both smacked of elitism, he told the small crowd. And both glorified tyrants. "Bob Dole was Nixon's hatchet man during Vietnam!" he ranted. The protesters hissed whenever he mentioned the name of a dinner attendee, and a twentysomething with Manic Panic-black hair pulled a gas mask over his face.

Far from all the speechmaking, the carefree-looking guy on the bike continued to scout the area where the protesters would end up. As he pedaled past the entrance to the Holidome, he spotted a man in a brown suit holding a video camera. The man stared.

"Timothy Byron Hecht!" the man with the camera yelled, sounding half drill sergeant and half scolding mom. That startled the biker -- known to almost everyone as Cricket.

How did that man who looked like a Secret Service agent know his legal name?

I am sixteen years old. I don't attend school. I don't work. I don't live at home. I don't know where I'll be one month from now. I don't worry. I have $82, a sleeping bag and a journal to my name. And I love life like never before.-- from the 'zine Dropping Out (for Students)

Timothy Byron Hecht (which isn't his given name any more than Cricket is; the federal government knows who he is, but he wanted to keep his identity secret from Pitch readers) dropped out of society when he was sixteen.

It was no surprise. He'd always been an outcast. He would spend hours alone playing on the computer in his family's basement. He often skipped school by himself. The only two or three kids who would talk to him were the super-rejects -- kids who'd been picked on so much themselves that they slunk around in a pack and called other kids fags.

Growing up in Durham, North Carolina, had been strange. There, upper-middle-class neighborhoods abutted federal housing projects, so Hecht saw a lot of poverty from his vantage point in a posh house financed by his mother's salary as a banker and his father's hefty IBM paycheck. Administrators at Hecht's school banned backpacks and lockers, and police conducted random drug searches. Hecht was smart and had a passion for botany, but his advanced-placement science classes failed to challenge him.

At the end of his junior year in 1999, one of the other outcasts from school took Hecht to an Oi Polloi show. The punk group from Scotland sang about oppression and the rape of their homeland. (Sample lyrics: Glued to the screen you sit and vegetate/A model citizen in a police state/Pumped so full of rubbish that you don't see/You're getting a cathode-ray lobotomy.) At the show, Hecht met a group of kids who looked different from anyone he'd seen -- they were filthy and wore old clothes stitched together with odd, homemade patches. They called themselves travelers.

They said they were making a statement with their lives: Fuck society, fuck patriarchy, fuck everything. Fuck capitalism by living on the fringes of society and contributing as little as possible to the government and to corporations -- by not working, by using money as little as possible, by squatting, hitchhiking or train hopping and getting free food out of Dumpsters and shoplifting from big retailers.

Like those kids, most travelers share the philosophy of the do-it-yourself movement, which grew out of the punk-rock scene. Rejecting the idea that corporations or experts should be paid for anything, DIYers have set up Web sites with detailed instructions on everything from knitting a Chihuahua sweater to performing your own abortion with herbs. But repudiating consumerism means no more TV and video games, so rambling around the country on little or no money has become the entertainment of choice for a certain subset within the DIY scene.