Budding Roses Summer Camp is a free two-week program, in Portland, Oregon, where 4th through 8th grade students can explore “social justice issues, youth leadership, arts activist, games and more!”
Due to the COVID-19 shutdowns, Budding Roses did not offer camps the past two years. Parents were forced to teach their children radical anarchism on their own.
But the organization did provide free, online resources, and these demonstrate what children and adolescents will learn this year, when Budding Roses runs its summer camp.
There’s the “Budding Roses Protest and Chant Book.” This isn’t filled with traditional camp songs like “Kumbayah” or “On Top of Spaghetti.” Little anarchists can learn songs like “Solidarity Forever,” the labor rights song from the International Workers of the World,” or there’s Woody Guthrie’s lovely little ditty “All You Fascists Bound to Lose.”
One chant (caution: language) for children to shout excoriates the police:
The whole damn system
Is guilty as hell,
Indict! Convict!
Put those killer cops in Jail,
The whole damn system
Is guilty as hell!
What parent wouldn’t want their nine-year-old kids singing a Chilean feminist protest song, “Un violador en tu camino” (A rapist in your path), to fight the patriarchy and sex-based violence? The lyrics portray judges, politicians, policemen and our entire government as “rapists”:
It’s the state that’s our oppressor, It’s the rapist government.
It’s the state that’s our oppressor, It’s the rapist government.
We know the rapist is you.
We know the rapist is you.
Children with a leftist message to share with the world can learn to create stencils and block prints, in order “to spread your art as wide as possible”:
With one stencil or blockprint you can make hundreds of copies of your image using just a bit of paint. Using these basic skills you decorate all the posters, stickers, t-shirts, walls, and streets you want!
After the summer camp, parents can take their middle schooler out to deface streets, buildings and signs with graffiti. The family that tags together, stays together!
With the “Black Lives Matter at School Coloring Book,” children will learn “What We Believe,” as they color in BLM principles such as “Restorative Justice,” “Globalism,” “Collective value” and being “Queer Affirming” and “Transgender Affirming.”
Another booklet is titled, “The Prison Industrial Complex and the Fight to Abolish It,” from the group Critical Resistance. Children will learn a skewed and inaccurate version of how policing began to develop in America:
Modern police departments and practices have their origins in maintaining the system of chattel slavery in North America. Organized units of white men were hired, or volunteered, to patrol plantations and the living areas of enslaved Black people to enforce the social order of white supremacy, and to recapture Black people who were escaping to the North.
There are so many more fun activities for families and children, such as a “Walking Tour of Radical Portland,” a “Police Abolition Activity,” a “White Supremacy Reflection,” and “Tear Gas for Portlanders,” a “zine about tear gas and its use by PPB [Portland Police Bureau] during the Summer 2020 protests.”
What elementary school student doesn’t need to know “about what tear gas is, how it was used in Portland, and ways to keep yourself safe if you get tear gassed”?
Budding Roses was founded as a project by the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, an organization with a utopian mission to “overthrow the state and capitalism and build a new world from the bottom up.”
As PJ Media reported:
The City of Portland has given the group space to conduct its in-person camp at a local park, and in 2018 granted the summer camp the “Spirit of Portland Award” for nonprofit initiative of the year.
The city has endured protests and riots off and on since 2016, when a November 10 protest of President Donald Trump’s election turned into several days of rioting. The Oregonian reported on those protests, and the year of violence that followed:
Some demonstrators smashed windows, threw bottles and set fires, prompting police to declare a riot. A protester was shot and wounded by a car passenger on another night as crowds blocked the Morrison Bridge. More than 100 people were arrested in a week.
Portland’s convulsive protests thrust the city into the national spotlight as they often descended into violence and chaos even as most demonstrators remained peaceful.
In the 12 months since, the churn of marches, demonstrations and rallies has become enduring fiber in the fabric of the city.
Some of these were fomented by far-right groups, but most have been from the left. Protests and riots continued each year, but greatly escalated with the death of George Floyd, beginning May 28, 2020, and continuing daily through October 2020.
Six years of unrest have caused many injuries, deaths and property damage.
So, of course the city provides funds and a space to train up the next generation of anarchists to bring further unrest and destruction to the City of Roses.
Related articles and resources:
After Months of Rioting, AG Barr Designates Three Cities as ‘Anarchist Jurisdictions’
Anarchist Educators – Preschool, Elementary and University Teachers Arrested in Protests in Portland
Antifa Assaults Families, Violently Breaks Up Christian Prayer Event in Portland
Antifa Launches Coordinated, Violent Protests Following President Biden’s Inauguration
MSNBC Host Defends Riots Across the Country, Instead Blames ‘White Nationalist Mobs’
Rioters in Portland Damage Statues of Lincoln and Roosevelt as Part of Columbus Day Protests
