Endgame Vol.1 (48 page)

Farmers broke up construction sites and corporate representatives said construction would not continue without police protection. The governor sent in state troopers, with up to ten cars and twenty cops protecting individual dump trucks.

The state legislature considered a moratorium on construction until further health studies could be performed. It was already known that electrical lines can lower conception rates and milk production in dairy cows. And the state’s own guidelines warned farmers against refueling their vehicles under the transmission lines, and warned school bus drivers against picking up or discharging children under them.

Across the state, people overwhelmingly favored the farmers over the utility corporations. But, as a corporate attorney argued, “The critical question for you as legislators is, is this a government of law, or of men?”

Think for a moment about that question, and think about its implications.

The legislators thought about it long enough to kill the moratorium.

By now the cops (who may have sympathized, but who were too enthralled to the machinery of civilization to follow their human hearts) were behind the power lines one hundred percent. They told farmers they couldn’t assemble, couldn’t drive county roads, couldn’t stop on township roads, couldn’t speak. When a farmer asked why cops were stopping farmers on county roads, the officer responded, “We will do whatever we can to get that power line through.” The farmer made the point that the officer did not say, “We are there to protect you,” nor even “We are there to protect the workers.”

In August, someone loosened the bolts on one of the 150-foot steel transmission towers. Soon after, it fell, and soon after that so did three more. People cut guard poles in half, they cut bolts three-quarters of the way through, then replaced them, waiting for someone to step on and break them.

The governor called out the FBI. A helicopter soon guarded the power line, presaging the sort of surveillance that is now familiar to the poor in many parts of the country. There were more than seventy arrests in one county alone. But home-cooked justice prevailed this time, as even the two people convicted of felonies were sentenced only to community service. In some cases, everyone refused to testify against the farmers.

A reporter asked one farmer whether he agreed with those who were bringing down towers. The farmer responded, “I wish a few more would come down, and I think they will, as time goes on. They shouldn’t have done this to us in the first place. We did everything we could lawfully. We went to Minneapolis, got lawyers, went through the courts. But either the judges are paid off, or they just don’t realize what’s going on here. I think there’s a lot of different laws and ways you can look at it. There’s moral laws, too. I don’t know, I don’t figure it’s wrong what we’re doing out here. Sure, people think you gotta stay with the law, but what is the law? Who makes it? We should have more of a say with what goes on in this state too, you know. They can’t just run over us like a bunch of dogs.”

Although the farmers ultimately lost—the power lines have been operating for two decades now—over the next two years they knocked down ten more towers, and shot out thousands of insulators.

Dissatisfied even with victory, the power corporations wanted to make sure no one would ever again challenge their hegemony. In the words of Philip Martin, “We got the federal government to pass the law” that it’s a federal crime to take down a tower transmitting electricity across state lines.

I’m sitting again by the cell phone towers, and this time I’m thinking,
I could do this
. There are, as with so many activities we may find intimidating, several categories of barriers to action. There’s the intellectual: I must convince myself it’s necessary. There’s the emotional: I must feel it’s necessary. There’s the moral: I must know it’s right. There’s the consequential: I must be willing and prepared to deal with the effects of my actions. Related to this, there’s the fearful: I must be willing to cross barriers of fear, both tangible, real, present-day fears and conditioned fears that feel just as real and present but are not (e.g., if I wanted
to go waterskiing, which I don’t, I would have to face not only whatever fears I might have of speeding behind a boat, but my visceral repulsion to waterskiing based on beatings associated with it when I was a child: there is no longer any danger of my father hitting anyone if I were to go waterskiing, but it still
feels
like there is. How many of our other fears have been inculcated into us by our families or the culture at large?). There’s the technical: I must figure out how best to proceed. There are undoubtedly others I can’t think of.

For someone to act—and this is a generic process, applying as much to asking someone out as to weeding a garden as to writing a book as to removing cell phone towers as to dismantling the entire infrastructure that supports this deathly system of slavery—each of these barriers to action must be overcome or sometimes simply bypassed in moments of great embodiedness, identification, and feeling (e.g., if someone were attempting to strangle me [with bare hands, as opposed to the toxification of my total environment] my movement through these various barriers to action would of necessity be visceral and immediate: no pondering, just reaching for the pen to stab into his eye).

Sure, I don’t know how to take down a cell phone tower. But that’s not why I don’t act. A purpose of this book is to help me and perhaps others examine and, if appropriate, move past these other barriers to leave us only with the technical questions of
how to
, because so often
how to
is actually the easiest question, the smallest barrier.

I could take out a cell phone tower. So could you. We’re not stupid (I’m presuming no members of the current Administration have made it this far in the book). And while our first few attempts may not be pretty—you’ll notice I don’t show you the first stories I ever wrote (at the time, my mother said they were good, yet now we both laugh when she says, “They were terrible, but I could never tell you that”) and even now I don’t show you my first drafts—but we would learn, just as we learn to do any technical task. I’m certain that if I made as many birdhouses as I write pages, not even David Flagg could laugh at them.

Practice makes perfect. This is as true of taking down cell phone towers as of writing. And fortunately, there are a lot of cell phone towers (I bet you never thought you’d see me append
fortunately
to a statement like that!). According to some estimates there are 138,000 cell phone towers in the U.S. (more than 48,000 of which are over two hundred feet tall
²⁶¹
), plus radio and television towers. And the number of American cell phone users went up another 23 million between 2000 and 2001, leading to the erection of 20,000 new towers.
²⁶²

That’s a lot of practice. If we just put our hearts and minds and hands to it, it probably won’t take very long before we get pretty good at it, so that taking down towers becomes something natural, like breathing, like taking long deep breaths of cool fresh air. Soon enough, we’ll wonder what took us so long to get started.

A teenager approached me after a talk. His eyes were on fire with intelligence and eagerness. He said, “I want to help you bring down civilization. I want to burn down factories.”

Sometimes when people say things like this to me I distance myself from them. This is partly in case they’re feds trying to entrap me—it’s a classic trick: the feds suggest the action, entice you into doing it, provide the materials, and when you acquiesce you find yourself saying good-bye to your life for the next sixty years. It’s partly because I don’t know these people, and they could very well be crazy: the last thing I’d want to do would be to associate myself with some pyro who gets off on the flames, and who masturbates in the corner as the building crumbles (well, that’s actually the second to last thing I’d want to do: the last thing would be to associate myself with a fed agent provocateur who gets off on putting people in little concrete cages). And it’s also partly to protect myself from people with bad boundaries: to come up and semi-publicly tell a complete stranger you want to burn down a factory would seem at the very least to be a fundamental breach of security.

But I immediately fell in love with this kid’s fierce sincerity. I thought a moment. There was no one around. I said, “Now, I would never want to discourage you or anyone from burning down a factory. But at the same time I want to emphasize that you have to be smart. One stupid mistake can cost you a lot.”

He nodded.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

He nodded again.

“Have you ever had sex?”

He shook his head.

“If you do this, and you get caught, you won’t be having sex for at least twenty years. I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m just saying this isn’t a game, and there are real consequences for acting against the wishes of those in power, for effectively opposing production. That doesn’t mean we should be afraid of those in power.
It means we should be very, very smart. Think it through, and then think it through a hundred more times. And then follow your heart.”

He nodded again.

I don’t always respond that way. Sometimes, as I said, I get as far away from them as I can. But once I was approached by someone who said, “I know how destructive dams are, and I know what’s at stake. My people are people of the salmon. Our entire way of life is centered around them. If you can get me the explosives I’ll take out a dam.”

I’d never met this man before, but I knew him by reputation. He wasn’t a fed. Nor was he crazy. Nor did he have bad boundaries. Nor was he young and inexperienced. He knew what he was talking about, and he knew what he would be risking.

He said, “I have young children, so I can’t do it for a few years. But when they’re old enough, I’ll do it.”

Unsaid, but hanging in the air between us, was the fact that once his children were old enough to understand, he would be prepared to die or go to prison to help the river run free.

“I don’t know how to do it,” I said. “And I don’t know how to get explosives.”

He nodded and smiled wryly, then said, “That’s okay. You’ve got a few years.”

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THE CIA’S
HUMAN RESOURCE EXPLOITATION Training Manual
, I forgot to mention that the Agency also put out instruction manuals on how to commit murder. The manuals make pretty fascinating reading in a ghoulish sort of way, if you can force yourself to forget that the book belongs not in the fiction section of the CIA bookshelf (along with their press releases and their analyses of the threats posed by other countries) but in the how-to section.