When I was growing up, my Dad was a graphic artist who worked from home. As a result, I was using Photoshop while other kids were using crayons. For me, art was a form of play for as long as I can remember, and as a teenager it was a tool of cathartic expression, but I didn’t imagine it as a form of activism until years later.

As a young man going to art school, I frequented a cafe that displayed art by local students. The art on display at eye level was constantly changing, featuring different artists every month, but on the back wall, hung near the ceiling was a humongous painting that never changed. It was the first time art ever had a political impact on me.

The canvas was easily eight feet wide, and the style was very nearly photo realistic, but it has a pulp comic quality to it as well. It looked as though the artist had borrowed the images from a newspaper, but I couldn't say for sure. It may very well have been the artists imagination. The right side of the canvas was an image of four men dragging the dismembered body of a fifth man out of the rubble of an explosion. Their faces were twisted in anguish, anger, fear and urgency while the fifth man’s head hung down so his face was obscured by a mop of bloody dark hair. The men were of some Asian descent. If I had to guess, I’d say Korean, or Vietnamese. The left side of the canvas was an image of a luxurious party in the Victorian style. The figures looked British, or maybe French, and their expressions were an exaggerated and grotesque elation. Their skin was unnaturally pale, giving them a vampiric quality, as they drank champagne flutes filled with blood.

To this day I don’t know what conflict the painting described, but I know exactly how the artist felt about it. Using juxtaposition, color and composition this artist not only expressed their own feelings, but changed my feelings without any knowledge of the actual historical events. Although I’d always instinctively been anti war, this painting made it visceral for me, even in the abstract, but more importantly it was the first time the concept of war was connected with the concept of empire, at least for me.

This is a power unique to art, and not just paintings. Music, books, movies, poetry, performance and virtually any form of art is capable of short cutting the intellectual gridlock and inserting an abrupt emotional argument. Best of all, more complex art is capable of reinforcing the emotional impact with new rational arguments while the audience’s guard is down. Consider this line from Captain America: Winter Soldier:

“You’re holding a gun at everyone on Earth and calling it protection.”

That’s a concept that most libertarians have expressed in some iteration, but it rarely influences statists who have faith in the security state. Yet, when the words come from Captain America, and all that he symbolizes, the concept seems perfectly reasonable for millions of moviegoers. In the film agents of Hydra have infiltrated Shield, which are both fictional agencies, but they call it Operation Paperclip by name, which was a real program after World War II. US intelligence agencies recruited agents and scientists from Nazi Germany at the end of the war.

By leveraging the emotional credibility of Captain America, these filmmakers have given us a fertile field in which to sow seeds warning about creeping fascism in America.

As my views became more complex, so did my art. Visual art can have an intense impact, but often lacks reinforcement. At some point, after writing long essays explaining the meaning of my visual art, I realized maybe writing was the better medium for me. So, recently fiction has been my art of choice. But what genre?

I was heavily influenced by science fiction. Books like Stranger In A Strange Land or Snow Crash influenced my thinking greatly, and science fiction gives authors the ability to invent a beautiful liberty out of whole cloth. But there is something impossibly utopian about science fiction. I think it’s important that we acknowledge how messy liberty can be. So, I chose zombies.

Survivor Max is a three part series I’m writing, and the first part is already published. The story follows 11-year-old Max as he navigates the zombie apocalypse, using the survival training imparted on him by his late liberty-minded father. Part of Max’s struggle is managing the threat of the infected “lamebrains” as he calls them. But the greater part of Max’s struggle will be how to interact with other survivors. How will they rebuild a new society from the corpse of the old? How does a libertarian view of property rights apply in a collapse scenario? Who has a greater survival strategy; those who raid, or those who trade? If my art is successful, after reading this adventure novel the reader will roll their eyes every time an emergency broadcast claims, “everything is under control.”

The zombie genre is great because most of the time the government is already irrelevant to the story. No one understands better than a zombie fan that the phrase “we’re from the government and we’re here to help” is a bad omen. If science fiction describes the gradual evolution of a free society in the future, zombie stories describe the sudden collapse of the state society and the struggle to survive in the messy liberty that follows.

Davi Barker �" Writer, artist, merchant, and speaker but more importantly an advocate of peace, independence and liberation from the State. A street activist in both the Tea Party and Occupy Movement, Davi has rejected the W2 9-to-5 world in favor of full time Agorism. He is the Launch Navigator of BitcoinNotBombs.Com. He is also the editor of DailyAnarchist.com, the proprietor of ShinyBadges.com, a marketing agent for SilverCircleMovie.com and the assistant director of Muslims4Liberty.org. T: @MuslimAgorist