Writing on the day after May Day, I pause to consider the anarchists that police arrested in Cleveland.

They were plotting to blow up a bridge.

For some time now, I've been writing that America is rocketing back to the early part of the last century.

With wages slipping backward, unions being broken, immigrants changing the face of the country, Trayvon Martin standing in for the Scottsboro Boys and the boss back to saying, "You're lucky to have a job," it might as well be 1900.

And now, as if on cue, police arrest anarchists.

Ah, anarchists, the first model of the "bomb-throwing radical." Killers of European leaders in the early part of the last century, they made a fetish of dynamite. "Ca ire," the French anarchists sang. "Every bourgeois will have his bomb."

Murmurs of "The Yellow Peril" return, as the Chinese manufacture all of America's toasters, televisions and T-shirts. Every square inch of the country is hung with bunting, as a few old men politicians try to shoo women back into the kitchen and blacks back into the cotton patch.

It makes me want to buy a straw hat and suspenders, makes me want to smoke a cigar and bray about "isolationism."

The Industrial Workers of the World. Strikes broken up by club-swinging "goons." Back-alley abortions. Lynching. Company "unions." A real "white man's country."

When I was in college, the few anarchists to be found were the children of semi-privilege, the sons and daughters of accountants and office managers who went to anarchist meetings because it was a sure and certain way to make your parents mad.

"We have to tear it all down so we can build a just society," the pimply anarchists said back then, blowing a cloud of smoke from a French cigarette.

Heady stuff, but no bombs. The mid '70s were no time for dynamite. We'd had our flutter with that during the Vietnam War years, when hippies who were pathetic at the job planted a few bombs, robbed a few banks and then ran, shocked that the masses hadn't risen on cue.

Anarchists are the too-sharp edge of rage at everything. The boss. Corporations. Low wages. The grind of the people at the bottom, who wear themselves down with electric bills and health insurance premiums.

In the last century, anarchists scared the hell out of the people in charge because anarchists openly espoused not just killing, but the killing of the rich — and death is the only thing a rich man can't scare away with laws and money.

Uncertain times and poverty create apathy, lassitude, a liking for OxyContin, heart attacks.

But enough poverty and uncertainty creates energy, the way scratching the tip of a match makes fire. Enough scratches, and the flame bursts forth.

And I would have been horrified if the bridge had exploded one morning, killing people who were headed to work on their last quarter tank of gas, needing to get the paycheck to fill up on $4-a-gallon regular.

It's grinding hard for the wage-earners right now, for the temporary workers, for the unemployed high school graduate, for the white single mother and the black family and the Hispanic paralegal whose pay won't cover clothes for three kids.

And that grinding will break some down, and it will make some stronger.

And some it will enrage.

It's 1905. The anarchists are throwing bombs again.

My guess is you'll see more of that before you see less.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.