Because of industrial civilization, human sperm counts have been cut in half over the last fifty years. At the same time, girls have begun to enter puberty earlier: 1 percent of three-year-old girls have begun to develop breasts or pubic hair, and in only the last six years, the percentage of girls under eight with swollen breasts or pubic hair has gone from 1 percent to 6.7 percent for white girls, and 27.2 percent for black girls.318
What are you going to do about this? Are you going to hope this problem somehow goes away? Will you hope someone magically solves it? Will you hope someone—anyone—will stop the chemical industry from killing us all?
Or will you do something about it?
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that it kills you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that once you’re dead they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, in fact more alive than ever before—but those in power no longer have a hold on you. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who depended on and believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.
And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think, but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or won’t) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or won’t) to defend the others you love. The you who will fight (or won’t) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depend. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you,319 but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase. Not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.
When you give up on hope—when you are dead in this way, and by being so are really alive—you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the co-optation of rationality and of fear that Nazis perpetrated on Jews and others, that abusers perpetrate on their victims, that the dominant culture perpetrates on all of us. Or rather it is the case that the exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to perpetrate this co-optation on themselves. But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like those Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
When you give up on hope, you lose a lot of fear. And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to just protect those you love, you become dangerous indeed to those in power.
In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good thing.
I’m talking to a friend, an ex-con, who says he thinks revolutions only take place when some critical mass of people get to what he calls the “fuck it” point: the point where things are so bad that people are finally ready to just say fuck it and do what needs to be done.
I can’t say I disagree.
It reminds me of a talk I gave a few months ago. I spoke of how so many of my students at the prison fully recognized civilization’s destructiveness and were ready to bring it all down. Afterwards someone from the audience stood and said that he was a public defender, and that his experience with his clients was radically different. They did not, he said, want to bring it all down. They merely wanted a bigger piece of the capitalist pie.
What he said struck me immediately as true. But I did not know how to merge that truth with what my former students had told me. Later that night a friend made it clear: the public defender and I were dealing with people who were at different parts of the process of being eaten by the state. The people he worked with had merely been arrested. Perhaps some still thought the system was fair. Perhaps others thought they could beat the system. Perhaps still others hoped merely that the system would not destroy them. None of them had yet reached the “fuck it” point. My students, on the other hand, were at a maximum security prison, many for the rest of their lives. There was no longer any reason for them to believe in the system. They had nothing left to lose.
We know what those in power do to those who threaten that power. Jeffrey Leuers burned three SUVs in an act of symbolic resistance, and was sentenced to more than twenty-two years in prison, a far longer sentence than that given to rapists, to men who beat their wives to death, to chemical company CEOs who give so many of us cancer. If we were to seriously threaten the perceived entitlement of those in power to convert the living world into consumer products to be sold, they would kill us.
I don’t particularly want to die. I love living, and I love my life. But I’ll tell you something that helped me lose at least some of the fear I have that those in power will kill me if I threaten their perceived entitlement to destroy the planet. I asked myself: What’s the worst they can do to me? Effectively, the worst they can do is kill me. Yes, they can torture me—as they do to so many—or they can put me in solitary confinement in a tiny box—as they also do to so many—but I would hope (there’s that word) that in those cases I’d be able to kill myself if necessary. Well, so far as I can figure, if they kill me, most probably one of three things will happen. One possibility is that when we die, it’s “boom, boom, out go the lights,” in which case I’ll just be dead, and I won’t know anything anyway. Another possibility is that after we die we go “somewhere else,” whatever that means, in which case I’ll just keep fighting them from there. And a third possibility is that after we die we get reincarnated. If that happens, I’ll follow the lead of the eighteen-year-old Indian Kartar Singh (Sardar Kartar Singh Saraba, or sometimes Shaheed Kartar Singh Saraba) who fought to drive the British from his home, and who in 1915 was betrayed and caught. When the magistrate overseeing the case was about to choose whether to hang him or imprison him for life, Kartar Singh stated: “I wish that I may be sentenced to death, and not life imprisonment, so that after re-birth, I may endeavour to get rid of the slavery imposed by the whites. If I am born as a female, I shall bear lion-hearted sons, and engage them in blowing to bits the British rulers.”320
The court decided he was too dangerous to be allowed to live.
I hope he came back to fight again.
The man from the EPA continued, “I’m glad you’re not a pacifist. I’m peaceloving myself, but have long studied martial arts. I don’t consider this a contradiction. Sometimes danger is a form of protection. There’s a reason that even peaceful wild things are born with thorns and claws. The real questions are: how and when you should ‘open the can of whoop ass’ (that’s redneck talk).
“I’m glad that you’re willing to eat meat yet you question how meat is produced. This is a very important distinction. I wrote a discharge permit for one of the largest slaughterhouses in the world. Five thousand cows per day, plus processing of meat from the equivalent of five thousand cows per day killed in off-site slaughterhouses. That’s a lot of slaughter. Pollution output like a big city. This is the most economically efficient production of meat the world has ever seen, but highly polluting and unconscionably cruel. I believe it hurts us as a people to allow this cruelty to animals, and it hurts our sou
ls to pretend meat is raised in some peaceful rural barnyard.
“You mentioned that you thought that things might go with a Bang. Since 9/11, I have been working on security issues, vulnerability assessments, response plans, etc. I know a bit about these matters and agree that there is a very real possibility of use of “weapons of mass destruction” by the U.S. or others. My pet theory, however, is not a bang, but a whimper. As you said, the gasoline party is over. We’ve passed the halfway mark of mineable petroleum supply, and the last half will be harder to extract economically than the first half. (Old Jed won’t find more bubbling crude without high tech equipment and expensive extraction methods.)
“Meanwhile, world consumption is growing.
“As oil, water, and key minerals go into shorter supply, the slow squeeze will begin. Power structures, political and otherwise, need power to stay in power. It’s hard to run an Empire on an empty tank, and the political/economic powerhouses could find themselves coughing to a stop in some very bad neighborhoods. That is happening now.
“In the twilight of a civilization, the state of emergency or crisis can last a century. There will be key watershed events within that cycle, but in terms of human experience, this cycle is evolutionary, punctuated by big scary events. Sort of like low-level warfare. Actually, it is characterized by low-level warfare. I believe we’re at the point of key events in this cycle. Our collective decisions are critically important right now. I am saddened that we’re so collectively asleep at the wheel, so enamored with the trivial and our trinkets.
“When I look at key points of crux, I think they focus around energy, water, and food. Gee that was hard: DUH! . . . The basics. The world industrial complex is geared up for overproduction, just as some key resources become scarce. When hungry people are overproducing widgets, while rich people go in debt to overconsume widgets, this will produce unexpected feasts and famines. We can expect more surprises from the energy sector. Infrastructure can be a very fragile thing if not actively maintained and sustained. Our dependence on genetically altered monoculture for food crops and animals sets us up for rapid spread of disease. There is a looming Dust Bowl (overgrazing) in China, which will greatly disrupt domestic food production, and this will spread ripples in the pond. We have rolled our own tit into this wringer. You are right: we are really FUCKED . . .
“I noted that some people were very disturbed by the fact that you consider some form of societal collapse is imminent. (‘I’m twenty, I want a life, what do I do?’) That one surprised me: I realized that I have considered societal crisis as an ongoing given, while others have not. Again, this as an evolving process, which will have flashpoints and key moments of decision.
“There is a way out, but it requires a certain minimum level of focus and engagement from the larger public. Unfortunately, the Bread and Circuses have paid off for Korporate Amerika. Most people are fairly satiated and numb, and they don’t have a place to put that vague gnosis of getting screwed. If something happened and the bulb switched on, we could use our remaining wealth as seed money. I wouldn’t mind a little Utopian thinking if it were practical and focused, with a vision of a minimized ecological footprint. If we don’t embrace that little downgrade of lifestyle now, we will pay dearly, and not that far down the road. I suspect that the downgrade will be forced upon us by the slow squeeze of economic downturn, etc.
“I think folks missed your message of healing. You managed to cry it through. Wish I did that more. You are right: Life is Wonderful, friends are loving, and there is a group of people who are ‘getting it.’ I am blessed with an occupation that allows me to push in the right directions, a wonderful son, good friends, a herd of nice old bonsai trees, and a bumper crop of watermelons. Lately, my relationships have been deeper than I thought possible. I’m rethinking things. My deepest wishes are changing. All of these are good reasons to stop the Pollyanna routine and get a little busy . . . Nothing wrong with being a mean old protective Earth Daddy. After all, a real good dog knows who to bite.”
THE CIVILIZED WILL SMILE AS THEY TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB
CIVILIZED MAN SAYS: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. “What I want” is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and the wilderness, to be used as I see fit.
Christina M. Kennedy321
IN THE LAST 24 FOURS, OVER 200,000 ACRES OF RAINFOREST WERE destroyed. Thirteen million tons of toxic chemicals were released. Forty-five thousand people died of starvation, thirty-eight thousand of them children. More than one hundred plant or animal species went extinct because of civilized humans.
All of this in one day.
I don’t think most people care, and I don’t think most people will ever care. We can trot out whatever polls we want to try to prove most Americans actually do care about the Environment™, Justice™, Sustainability™—that they care about anything beyond being left alone to numb themselves with alcohol, cheap consumables, and television. We can cite (or make up) some poll saying that all other things being equal, 64 percent of Americans don’t want penguins to be driven extinct (unless saving them will even slightly increase the price of gasoline); or we can cite (or make up) some other poll saying that 22 percent of American males would prefer to live on a habitable planet than to have sex with a supermodel (this number climbs to 45 percent if the men are not allowed to brag about it to their friends).322 But the truth is that it’s just not that important to most people—it in this case being the survival of tigers, salmon, traditional indigenous peoples, oceans, rivers, the earth; it also being justice, fairness, love, honesty, peace. If it were, “most people” would do something about it.
Sure, most people would rather that they themselves be treated with at least the pretense of justice, fairness, and so on, but so long as those in power aren’t aiming their Peacekeepers™ at me, why should I care if brown people living on a sea of oil a half a world away get blown to bits? Likewise, so long as the price of my prescription anti-depressants stays reasonably low and the number of TV channels on my satellite dish stays high, why should I care that some stupid fish can’t survive in a dammed river? It’s survival of the fittest, damn it all, and I’m one of the fit, so I get to survive.
Another way to talk about people not caring what happens to the world is to talk about rape and child abuse. Most rapes are committed not by burly strangers breaking into women’s homes, nor by pasty-faced perverts lurking outside schools and in internet chat rooms, but instead by fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, lovers, friends, counselors, pastors: those who purport to love the women (or men) they hurt. Similarly, most children are not abused by thugs who kidnap them and force them to act in porn films, but by their caretakers, those, once again, who purport to love them, who are supposed to help them learn how to be human beings. And of course these caretakers are taking care to teach these children how to be civilized human beings: teaching them that the physically powerful exploit and do violence against the less physically powerful; teaching them that exploiters routinely label themselves—and probably believe themselves—caretakers as they destroy those under their care; teaching them that under this awful system that’s the job of caretakers; teaching them that life has no value (for of course we are all born with the knowledge that life has value, a knowledge that must be beaten, raped, and schooled out of us).
Those doing the raping, beating, schooling, are not only some group of strange “others”: “trailer trash,” “foreigners,” “the poor.” They include respected members of this society. Within this culture, they’re normal people. Their behavior has been normalized.
If normal people within this culture are raping and beating even those they purport to love, what chance is there that they will not destroy the salmon, the forests, the oceans, the earth?
A few years ago I had an agent at a prestigious literary agency. The agency’s address, if this gives
an indication of how fancy schmancy the organization is, was One Madison Avenue (an entire floor, even!). I sent my agent the first seventy pages of the manuscript for A Language Older Than Words. She read them, then told me that if I cut the family stuff and the social criticism, she thought I’d have a book. She also told me that I was too angry. If I would only tone down the book and not frighten fence-sitters, she said, I’d have myself a bestseller.
I was shocked. I was of course familiar with the old artistic/literary line, “The devil comes promising a larger audience,” but it never occurred to me I’d have the chance to sell out this early in my career.
I responded that there was an old blues DJ I liked to listen to who often said after spinning a song, “If you’re not moving after that one, you’re dead from the butt down.” Well, I said, if you’re not angry and frightened now, after everything this culture has done, you’re dead from the heart out.
In retrospect, that might not have been the most relational thing I could have said.
We had this conversation the same day U.S.-backed troops massacred the MRTA members who had taken over the Japanese ambassador’s house in Peru. I said to her, “If the MRTA members are going to give their lives, the least I can do is tell the truth. You’re fired.”
Her request—that I tone things down to not offend fence-sitters—is the non-battle-cry of cowards everywhere: Too scared even to say that they themselves are frightened, they resort to telling others—for their own good, of course—to tone down their words or actions so some mythical third party won’t be affronted or frightened. You must never blow up a dam, they tell us, or mainstream Americans will consider all environmentalists terrorists. You will actually hurt the cause of salmon. Likewise, You must never demand an end to old-growth logging (or even think about stopping industrial forestry), or you will alienate potential political allies. And, You must never speak out against capitalism (industrialism, utilitarianism, Christianity, science, civilization, and so on) or no one will take you seriously.
Endgame Vol.1 Page 39