I’m Ben Pink Dandelion.
I’m a Quaker writer and teacher.
Well, I first went to college to study hotel
management, but I was also very involved with
a series of left-wing groups and ended up
dropping out of college and going to live
at an anarchist peace camp.
Now, anarchism is an ideology which is very
much in favor of individual power, that nobody
should have power over anybody else.
And we were a group of great individualists,
in a sense, living at this peace camp.
We had different colored hair, different hair
styles.
Eventually we would all change our names to
something rather ridiculous, like “Pink
Dandelion” as a protest of the way that
the father’s name is always passed down.
So I like to be called Ben but my legal name
is Pink Dandelion and this was a deliberate
ploy to come up with something that was, again,
pushing against other people defining who
you will be.
This was in the early ’80s and it was a
year of great revolutionary hope in Britain.
We had a miner’s strike on.
We thought we had Margaret Thatcher on the
back foot.
Life was about protest.
But after about eight or ten arrests, you
know, and really not feeling like we were
moving forward at all, I began to think that
there probably wouldn’t be a revolution
in England.
And so at that point, you give up a revolutionary
strategy.
The anarchist strategy had been to hope that
everyone would withdraw their labor from the
labor market and the system would collapse.
So I looked for groups that were working from
within the system.
I had known the Quakers because I had been
to a Quaker school, and I found them again,
as it were.
And I saw there a group that was committed
to peace, a group that didn’t take votes
(just as was true of the anarchists) and who
didn’t have any fixed leadership, just like
the anarchists.
And I thought, “Here’s a group that looks
just a little bit like the anarchists but
working within the system.”
So I originally came along to Quakerism in
terms of it being a peace group.
And it was only later, when I had a powerful
spiritual experience on a Greyhound bus, that
I really understood Quakerism, that I could
begin to see the spiritual dimension, that
meeting for worship made sense for me, that
meeting for business made absolute sense.
So it was a different kind of process from
the anarchist consensus.
We were being “talked through” in Quaker
meeting in a way that just wasn’t true in
the anarchist campfire meetings.
