Endgame Vol.1 (59 page)

A while back I got an email from someone in Spokane, Washington. He said his fifteen-year-old son was wonderfully active in the struggle for ecological and social sanity. But, the father continued, “I want to make sure he stays active, so I feel the need to give him hope. This is a problem, because I don’t feel any hope myself, and I don’t want to lie to him.”

I told him not to lie, and said if he wants his son to stay active, he shouldn’t try to give him hope, but instead to give him love. If his son learns how to love, he will stay active.

A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place.
³¹⁷
You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you, nor did it make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased
hoping
your problems somehow get solved, through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing what’s necessary to solve your problems yourself.

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 souls 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.)