by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 15, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health
By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance
A dystopia is a community or society, usually fictional, that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia. Such societies appear in many works of fiction, particularly in stories set in a speculative future. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society. Elements of dystopias may vary from environmental to political and social issues. Dystopian societies have culminated in a broad series of sub-genres of fiction and are often used to raise real-world issues regarding society, environment, politics, religion, psychology, spirituality, or technology that may become present in the future. For this reason, dystopias have taken the form of a multitude of speculations, such as pollution, poverty, societal collapse, political repression, or totalitarianism. (From Wikipedia)
Although I do not claim to be well-read when it comes to science fiction writing (the only dystopian novel I can remember reading is 1984 and it scared the shit out of me), I don’t think you have to be a sci-fi scholar to see that we are living in a dystopian culture.
Civilization is a dystopia. It contains all of the characteristics of the basic dystopian narrative, and it’s only getting worse over time. This culture causes and perpetuates the most reprehensible behaviors, and has created the most violent reality the planet has ever endured. But what makes it downright insidious is its unashamed attempts at masking this reality by creating an entirely fake one to distract us, to keep us occupied while the planet and its community of life perishes.
Violence is not only inevitable in an extractive culture, it’s necessary. By definition, civilization requires violence, because cities require the importation of resources due to its denuding the resources on its own landbase, and therefore must be violent towards other cultures and their landbases in order to secure necessary resources. This culture is literally draining the planet dry, hurtling it towards a Venus-like future. That this is even a possibility is horrible beyond description.
Pathology is common in this culture. The most notorious psychopaths – those running corporations, governments, militaries and police – are rewarded for their behavior. They are afforded even more opportunities to enact violence on the planet and its life. Think about how morally depraved a culture must be to reward psychopathic behavior. To make it worse, this culture has created social conditions inevitably resulting in poverty and addiction and then punishes the victims of its own creation. This is why victims of substance abuse can be imprisoned but corporate executives are allowed to retire with pensions. This is why homeless people are beaten, harassed and jailed for sleeping on the street but homes are allowed to sit vacant, and police protect the property of wealthy business owners.
In a more sane, just culture, such people wouldn’t be able to walk the streets safely. They would fear for their lives. Anyone who pollutes air, water and soil or otherwise enacts violence on entire groups of people should be afraid to leave their homes. But in this world we live in – this depressing reality – we consider the worst behaviors to be of the most benefit.
This culture hates women, people of color, the poor, indigenous communities and ultimately life itself. It has declared war on nature, as biotic cleansing is the very mechanism of its method of food production, and complete ecosystem collapse its inevitable result. Ours is a reality in which men battering women is the most common crime, and rape is used as a weapon of war. Ours is a frightening mix of genocide, resource depletion, mass extinction and endless warfare.
We create video games that glorify the worst tendencies. Members of this culture are trained from childhood to rely on technology for entertainment, and then to crave the propaganda and outright lies this culture disseminates using that technology. We live vicariously through celebrities, because our own lives are so void of inherent meaning other than to perpetuate this system. And most of us are so dependent on it, we will fight to keep it going.
Deep within our consciousness, in our hearts and minds – and our memory – we know this culture is depraved. We are afraid of this world. We hide in our homes, some of them fenced-off and guarded from the rest of the world. We collectively escape reality through movies, television, theme parks and shopping (i.e. behavior marked by over-consumption, impulse and lifestyle elitism). We spend innumerable resources convincing ourselves to consume, so much that we have become identified with consumption. We call ourselves consumers.
Do I even need to get into the increasing totalitarianism of the surveillance infrastructure?
Civilization is insane. Members of this culture are suffering from a psychosis, a crisis of the mind and spirit. We are disconnected from the very source of life on this planet. We hate nature so much we would rather create supernatural beings resembling our worst tendencies and behaviors, force each other to worship these creations under threat of violence, and then lie to ourselves about these created deities loving and saving us. We are so disconnected from the natural world that we project our own psychosis onto it, so that we begin to see the entire cosmos as just as dysfunctional as we are, and then use that as an excuse to commit further violence against it.
Some of us, even in the midst of such a crazy world, still find ways to love deeply, fight passionately and enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Many people are adjusting their lens to view the world as it really is, even though it’s painful to do. Having decided to embrace our situation with courage, instead of with cowardice, we have refused to continue to allow this culture to persist any longer. We are driven by a love for this planet and its community of life, and determined to give it a chance to thrive once more.
It takes bravery to step outside of this culture and accept reality, to see the atrocities and no longer consider them inevitable. But this bravery is necessary. We need more sane people in the world. We need more people accepting the truth no matter how much it hurts. We need more people who are completely intolerant of such gross levels of suffering, who will offer their time, energy and bodies in defense of this beautiful planet.
The planet needs us, and we need us. And we are the only ones who will save us.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 1, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
“There is a problem. It’s a big problem. It’s not just the kids in the inner city. It’s the average middle-class family dealing with this and suffering huge losses.” The problem is heroin. The voice quoted here belongs to a local parent who just lost two sons after they overdosed on the drug.
I live in a relatively small, mostly white, and definitely conservative Midwestern city where this just keeps happening: kids are dying. Heroin has been seeping into my community for years now. Combined with an already existing culture of heavy drinking, and the addiction, poverty, and violence that almost always accompanies substance use and abuse, the result should be obvious: a new twenty-something-year-old face in the obituaries every week. They didn’t die because they were simply irresponsible or reckless; this crisis is built in to the dominant culture, and nothing will get better until this culture is changed.
We live in a society that values money above all else. Money comes before education, before healthcare, before children, before community. Decisions affecting all of us are made according to profit motive rather than human need. On every level, capitalism systematically exploits and destroys healthy communities.
The backdrop to this local heroin crisis is a repressive city that does little to serve young people or anyone besides the rich elites who run it. Social programs and initiatives are relatively nonexistent. Cafes, music venues, and other social spaces are denied funding so that they usually have an expiration date of less than a year. We’re left with only a few options: get a job, get high, or plan to move away. The gate-keepers of this community enforce a terrible double-standard: they won’t talk about their kids who are shooting up and dying, but they also won’t provide (or allow) an alternative.
Speaking of no alternatives, about one-third of this country’s population is living below the poverty line or near it. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. The places hit first and hardest are what Chris Hedges calls “sacrifice zones.” These are the colonies of empire—the ghettos, the barrios, and the reservations. Like the grieving parent alluded, it’s not uncommon that “kids in the inner city” die young, because those communities were gutted—flooded with alcohol, gentrified, and stripped of social services—long ago. But now, the pillaging has come around full circle to take even the children of the “average middle class family,” the children of the elites.
The story is the same everywhere: when there’s nothing to live for, there’s no reason to care about living. Hopelessness is universal.
Last night I had a conversation with one of my peers who quickly moved from this town as soon as she was of age. In just one year, 12 of her hometown friends have died from heroin or drunk driving.
My childhood best friend, 20 years old, overdosed on heroin. A year later, his friend, also 20 years old, overdosed on heroin. A person I had a crush on in the 8th grade recently died after driving drunk. A person I used to go skateboarding with in high school recently died after driving drunk and smashing his car into a brick wall. I wish I couldn’t, but I could go on and on.
My heart breaks a little more every time a young person’s life is so needlessly taken because of the sad, sorry culture built by generations before us. From Palestinian and Pakistani children bombed to death, to the guns fired by gang kids, to the unheard cries of suicidal victims of bullying, to the cities mourning too many heroin-related deaths to count—the young did not design this cruelty, nor do we have much of a say in changing it.
We have only two choices: adapt or die.
Some people can’t adapt. They were born into a body that simply doesn’t allow it—one that is female, one that is not white. Even if members of historically oppressed classes want to adapt to this culture, they are always denied the status of full human beings. But the choice was never meaningful for any of us; you can only adapt to drinking poison for so long before it kills you as sure as it does anyone else.
Adapt or die. Deep in our hearts, young people understand the profound sickness we are being socialized into. There’s little to make us feel alive in this routine of school, work, die. Save suicide, how do you cope with that? Welcome to addiction. It can be drugs, alcohol, money, sex, or anything that will numb the pain of being trapped in desperation. We’re floating in a sea of despair, struggling just to keep our heads above the water of self-destruction, but all the while sinking into a pit of hopelessness and forgetting what it means to feel alive. Eventually, as was true for my friends no longer living, a person just gives up.
Before fizzling out, many will grasp for control by abusing whoever is nearby. But perpetuating cruelty will not save you from emptiness. Breaking boundaries is a habit that can only end in overdoses, alcohol poisoning, bullet wounds, and a short life devoid of anything resembling love.
Adapt or die. The only way out of a double-bind is to tear it down and start over. Conformity will not get us anywhere. There’s no shortcut to a life of meaning and integrity. And to get there, we have to choose not to adapt, not to die, but instead to resist. We need take back the humanity we’ve been denied.
Capitalism requires obedience. It needs good workers, good consumers, and good citizens, who have submitted our own wills and desires for the sake of “the way things are.” Sure, we might get a little rowdy once in a while, but as long as we don’t fundamentally challenge the system in which we’re trapped, nothing changes. Dead kids are of no consequence as long as they remain powerless to the very end.
Many from generations before us have chosen to resist this corrupt arrangement. But far too many more have not; they accepted the system as their personal savior, always willing to defend their conditions and never raise a finger or mutter a word in defiance. The result is a world of expanding sacrifice zones, which have now become so large as to subsume the youth of everywhere.
When asked why she was protesting the liquor barons preying on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Lakota activist Olowan Martinez said, “Today I defend the minds of our relatives. Alcohol is a plague; it’s a disease; it’s an infection that causes our young people to kill themselves, to harm each other, to harm their own. We need to stop it before it’s too late. We came here to save the minds and mentality of our own nation.”
Young people today have no real chance of a future with good education, decent housing, and enough food or water. Moreover, we have no real chance of becoming who we are and who we truly want to be, no real chance of claiming the desires and dreams that are our birthright as sentient beings. The planet is burning, human societies are collapsing, and those in power are profiting from it all. It is our generation and those to come after that inherit this mess. We are living out an endgame and everything is at stake: life and all that makes life worth living.
Getting high will not make the horrors disappear. But until the horrors disappear, we can be sure that kids will keep getting high.
The youth have the most to lose, but we also have the most potential to turn things around. We can stop giving up our souls and, ultimately, our bodies, to this culture of despair. We can join with young people everywhere—from Palestine to Chicago, from Newtown to Pine Ridge—to let the powerful know that we will not be sacrificed for their profit. We will put down the drugs and put up our clenched fists. We will say enough is enough. We will not adapt and we will not die.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 11, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
The dominant culture, industrial civilization, is insane. Literally. It is in direct opposition to life. We can see this by looking from any angle: an economic system based on the infinite consumption of living beings; the spiritual sickness that allows clear-cuts, rape, conquest, and oceanic dead-zones; social rewards for those who can fuck others over most efficiently. as the world burns, the destructiveness of this culture has become too clear for debate.
Consuming the living and converting them into dead products is essential to the functioning of civilization. indeed, it is the meaning of the word “production”. civilization as a whole can be defined by its material functioning: a culture based on the growth of cities, with cities being defined as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. it can also be described as a system that socially rewards (and requires) exploitation, domination, and atrocity. Both definitions reveal civilization’s fundamental death urge.
What is killed by civilization includes the psyches and souls of human beings. Consider, for example, the global scale of people struggling with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Bi-Polar Disorder (at least two million people in the United States alone), Depression, and Anxiety. Consider also lives wasted in wage slavery, addiction, and apathy. Some know mental struggle more intimately than others, but the dominant culture makes all of its members sick.
This book is for those who feel, in their bones, the struggle of living in such a culture, and for those who love life and want to fight back. The numerous activists, artists, and writers who have contributed to this book also surely know this struggle. Included here is a compilation of personal stories, essays, artwork, and maps for healing, all pointing towards, and developing an answer to, this general question: what does it mean to be sane in an insane culture?
Download Mental Health & Civilization: A Compilation
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 19, 2012 | Alienation & Mental Health, Gender, Male Violence
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
“Hello! I’ve decided to tell you about my never ending story.” These were the words written on the first two flashcards that 15-year old Amanda Todd shows viewers in the silent video she created about two months before she recently committed suicide to escape social torture.
Anti-bullying posters hang in every public school across the United States, yet kids continue to harass and hurt each other without intervention. Every school day, 150,000 students stay home out of fear of being picked on. Bullying has become epidemic, but still is only a symptom of the broader culture in which it exists. Despite even the most earnest efforts, youth problems and school problems cannot be solved until social problems and cultural problems are.
Amanda Todd is dead not only because she was born into this culture of bullying, but because she was born into it with a female body. Her flashcards continued: “In 7th grade I would go with friends on webcam meet and talk to new people. Then got called stunning, beautiful, perfect, etc. Then wanted me to flash. So I did. 1 year later I got a msg on facebook from him. Don’t know how he knew me. It said if you don’t put on a show for me I will send ur boobs. He knew my address, school, relatives, friends, family names. Christmas break. Knock at my door at 4am. It was the police. My photo was sent to everyone. I then got really sick and got anxiety, major depression, and panic disorder.”
While tragic to be sure, Amanda’s case is but one among countless more that lead girls and women first to crippling depression and then to their deaths.
“I then moved and got into drugs and alcohol,” the flashcards went on. “My anxiety got worse…couldn’t go out. A year past and he came back with my new list of friends and school. But made a facebook page. My boobs were his profile pic. Cried every night, lost all my friends and respect people had for me…again. Then nobody liked me. Name calling, judged. I can never get that photo back. It’s out there forever. I started cutting. I promised myself never again. Didn’t have any friends and I sat at lunch alone. So I moved schools again.”
The public humiliation visited upon Amanda Todd is a routine experience for women living under patriarchy, the system currently ruling the world through a campaign of violence. Many girls who have been similarly targeted have not and likely will never have their stories told because, unlike Amanda, they have the added disadvantage of being poor or lesbian or not white on top of already being female, which is hard enough.
“Everything was better even though I sat still alone at lunch in the library every day. After a month later I started talking to an old guy friend. We back and fourth texted and he started to say he liked me. Led me on. He had a girlfriend. Then he said come over my gf’s on vacation. So I did…huge mistake. He hooked up with me. I thought he liked me. 1 week later I get a text get out of your school. His girlfriend and 15 others came including himself. The girl and 2 other just said look around nobody likes you. In front of my new school (50) people. A guy than yelled just punch her already. So she did…she threw me to the ground and punched me several times. Kids filmed it. I was all alone and left on the ground. I felt like a joke in this world…I thought nobody deserves this. I was alone.”
Patriarchy means rule by men. Women can certainly support this system, as we see in the case of the girls who attacked and abandoned Amanda Todd instead of supporting her when she needed it the most. Never will women truly benefit from patriarchy, though, as it is predicated on their subjugation to men. Patriarchy is a system of power that controls women’s lives in every sense: economically, socially, bodily, and otherwise. Men and women are trained from birth to accept and fit into their respective social classes, known in shorthand as masculinity and femininity.
Masculinity says that men are only real men when they are violating or dominating someone else, someone whom they’ve deemed as “Other.” Femininity is also designed by and benefits men, because it attempts to naturalize female submission by claiming that women just like to be hurt and controlled. The school years are some of the most formative for human development, and so serve as a prime opportunity to indoctrinate children into the myth of patriarchy.
Kindergarten through twelfth grade schooling may be too far back for some to clearly remember, but surely the word “cooties” rings a bell. In this single word is all we need to know about how girls and boys are trained to see one another. What they see is that despised “Other.” Not human beings. From girls versus boys playground games, to boys at a slumber party huddled around a Playboy, to incidents of date rape after prom, children know perfectly well the meaning of sexism, of sexual hatred, regardless of if they articulate it or not. Boys know how to do it and girls know how it feels to have it be done to.
And children know perfectly well the meaning of homophobia and racism, too.
Amanda’s flashcards continue: “I lied and said it was my fault and my idea. I didn’t want him getting hurt, I thought he really liked me. But he just wanted the sex…someone yelled punch her already. Teachers ran over but I just went and layed in a ditch and my dad found me. I wanted to die so bad…when he brought me home I drank bleach. It killed me inside and I thought I was gonna actually die. Ambulence came and brought me to the hospital and flushed me.”
Few will hesitate to sum up the case of Amanda Todd as bullying, plain and simple, but perhaps it’s not so plain or simple. In her article about the Amanda Todd tragedy, educator and feminist Fazeela Jiwa takes the term “bullying” to task. She writes, “Bullying glosses over structural reasons for violence—reasons like race, gender, ability, and sexuality, among a myriad of insidious social hierarchies.”
From what is public knowledge about the trajectory of Amanda’s suffering, it’s hard not to see that the bullying she experienced was a direct result of her being female. Like all girls and women, she was a target of male violence. As Amanda has made clear, she was majorly coerced and exploited by two distinct male characters: the first pressured her to show her naked body over the internet, images of which he saved and used as blackmail against her for more sexual favors; the second manipulated her into having sex with him, only to later pit his girlfriend against her which resulted in the severe ambush that brought Amanda to first attempt suicide.
“After I got home all I saw on facebook—she deserved it,” read Amanda’s words. “Did you wash the mud out of your hair? I hope shes dead. Nobody cared. I moved away to another city to my moms. Another school…I didn’t wanna press charges because I wanted to move on. 6 months has gone by…people are pasting pics of bleach, clorex, and ditches. Tagging me. I was doing a lot better too. They said she should try a different bleach. I hope she dies this time and isn’t so stupid. They said I hope she sees this and kills herself.”
A few years ago, an anti-bullying event was hosted at City Hall. I and two other young activists and personal friends of mine were asked to speak on a panel on behalf of a radical community space with which we were involved. Other panels included teachers, parents, therapists, and students. All presented from their unique perspectives on the harms of bullying in school environments. Lesbian and gay high school students shared stories of being personally abused by kids at school: they told stories of being physically struck, shoved, and spit on. Many heterosexual students spoke, too. They were not spared from bullying either, targeted usually because they apparently looked or talked the wrong way.
Most of the adults who spoke suggested as a solution more strict consequences for those caught bullying. They also suggested more established support networks for the victims. Both ideas seemed appropriate to me, yet clearly incommensurate on their own. These have been the same solutions offered for years and bullying has not been prevented as a result. When it was my panel’s turn to speak, we pointed out that bullying is not an isolated act, but an obvious by-product of a culture sick with the drive of competition. We dared to be more explicit about the root problem: capitalism. (In case you’re wondering, no. The police stationed at the City Hall building were not in attendance at the event. And no, they did not ask us to spend the night.)
Who is ultimately responsible for Amanda Todd’s death? Who can stop bullying?
Is it the teachers? First of all, that depends on if the teacher is a decent human being. Many teachers, especially those who are male, do nothing but egg on the aggression in students. For our purposes, though, let’s say the teacher truly does care and wants to do what she or he can to prevent bullying. Well, next is how. The means available for teachers to make a difference are rapidly dwindling with school boards and administrations being taken over by the right-wing, comprised of people who are bent on disallowing even art and music programs, never mind a comprehensive anti-bullying curriculum. Regardless, much bullying happens out of the sight of teachers. It’s in the bathrooms, in the hallways, at recess, or before or after school.
Then it’s up to the parents to stop it. Once again, this depends on the parents being good human beings. Judging by the mass injustice and ecological crises caused by this society, I don’t see much reason to be optimistic about most people. However, for our purposes, let’s pretend these are parents that truly do care, that want to do what it takes to stop their child from bullying others or from being bullied. The parents can spend all the time they’d like having conversations with their child after school, but most kids learn just as much or more about life from the other kids they are around during the day. Unless every parent of every student is teaching the same lessons of love and compassion, and unless every student is listening in earnest and soaking up the morals, it’s only a matter of time before one child comes across another who says something like, “hey, let’s go make fun of that girl’s crooked teeth” or “hey, look at that fat kid.”
All of this brings us back to the original culprit; the one that creates the indecency of so many teachers and parents who enable bullying. I’m speaking of the dominant culture. If we have any chance of stopping the cruelty committed by children, we must stop the cruelty committed by adults. Where do we think the kids learn it? As Fazeela Jiwa notes, “Violent behavior stems from a tolerance of, or a reluctance to acknowledge, the power imbalances mired in the fabric of our social structures at all age levels…The same oppressive learned behaviors occur in the workplace, in bars and clubs, on the street, and in other adult-inhabited places.”
This whole country was founded on bullying. It started and continues with the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, the use of women as chattel, and the destruction of the natural world. To stop bullying means to stop the misogynists, white supremacists, homophobes, and earth-killers in power. It means to end capitalism.
Amanda Todd’s never ending story eventually did end when she tried again to drink bleach, and this time succeeded in taking her life. Even after her death, people continue to celebrate her humiliation and complain about the public outcry as annoying. This is sadism beyond words.
Those who are bullied need to know it’s not their fault. Those who are not bullied need to stand in absolute solidarity and intervene at every instance of abuse. As long as some people profit, whether socially or economically or both, from another’s suffering, none of us are free. Amanda’s never ending story is the never ending story of so many suffering under this cruel and ruthless culture. Unless we rise up to stop it, we can expect nothing from the future but more Amanda Todds.
“Why do I get this?” the flashcards in Amanda’s video finished. “I messed up by why follow me. I left your guys city. I’m constantly crying now. Every day I think why am I still here? My anxiety is horrible now. Never went out this summer. All from my past…lifes never getting better. Can’t go to school meet or be with people. Constantly cutting. I’m really depressed. I’m on antidepressants now and counseling and a month ago this summer I overdosed. In hospital for 2 days. I’m stuck…whats left of me now. Nothing stops. I have nobody. I need someone. My name is Amanda Todd.”
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 1, 2012 | Alienation & Mental Health, Culture of Resistance
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
Children learn early on to trust their parents. Adults are, without a moment’s hesitation, relied upon to take care of problems and make everything okay. When problems do arise, children may not even be aware of the unease, shielded as they are by the eternal wisdom of their elders, who surely will guide any troubles to a course of comfort and deliver the world, once again, to balance.
This is a story ubiquitous and seemingly obvious enough to make saying it aloud almost strange. Trust in the adults around you is, to the child, as normal as air and water, as self-evident as life itself. More unspoken is that the care delivered from parent to child requires, by definition, long-term thinking: a vision of the world in which this child will grow and a plan for how the parent can positively shape the outcome. Why would a child second-guess this, when all of life’s necessities seem to be taken care of?
It’s time to take another guess. Not because parents shouldn’t take care of children in these ways and not because parents aren’t capable of it; my friends who are parents exemplify that this is not the case (and, I should add, would probably stop returning my phone calls if I tried to claim otherwise). Rather, it is because, whether child or adult, we can no longer unwittingly rely on caretakers to think long-term for us or teach us how to think that way ourselves.
Ours is a culture defined by short-term and impulsive thinking for immediate (perceived) gains, regardless of the (obvious) long-term costs. Tragically, too many children will grow to find the adults in their lives under this same thrall, acting not from wisdom, care, or foresight, but from greed, selfishness, and hatred.
This is the story of the dominant culture. Just substitute citizens of empire for the child and those who run the empire for the parental figure. Greed, selfishness, and hatred are not traits inherent in human beings, but are as a matter of course learned from this culture of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrial civilization. We are not children anymore, but subservient just the same when we choose to ignore the glaring and painful reality before us in favor of that soothing fairy tale.
It doesn’t get more irresponsible than the decisions made by this culture’s decision-makers. From the oppression of human beings to the wholesale destruction of the natural world, the choices that have lead—and continue to lead—to atrocities are made by the same kind of adults raising children under the fairy tale spell that everything is going to be all right.
Everything is not all right and it’s not going to be all right as long as we blindly trust those in power to make choices of good will, to make choices with our collective futures in mind. Presently, the world is being ripped to pieces: rivers are full of poison; whole mountains are exploded; supremacy is used to justify the vast subjugation of human populations. The first step to halting these disasters is to take an honest look at who is causing them.
The clarity of naming a perpetrator opens the door on the many routes available to those who wish to stop them. But, as long as we cling to the myths about being unconditionally cared for by those who make decisions on our behalves—parents, teachers, bosses, politicians, CEOs—we are cut off from seeing the possible reality that it is these same people who are enacting or colluding with the perpetration. Not only do the powerful neglect our safety, but they jeopardize our future. It doesn’t matter how old you are; the almost-holy trust placed in parents by children is no different than that most people place in the system and those who run it. This is to say it’s never too late to admit to the thrall enslaving your perceptions—and it’s never too late to snap out of it.
That most people will not admit to an infantilizing dependency on being controlled does not change that, time and time again, they submit their wills to the whims of the powerful. In this culture of It’s Just The Way Things Are; blown up mountains, broken rivers, and suffering human beings do not even faze a depressingly large number of people. This is not because of an inability to love, but because of a thick denial of the truth that what politicians and corporations promise are simply lies (unless, of course, they are promising to maintain the American Way Of Life, in which case they are telling bloody and devastating truths).
How much betrayal does it take for someone to lose trust? How much destruction can the dominant culture administer against the world before a mass movement rises to end it? I would have hoped that a near-dead planet—the eradication of most large fish in the oceans, most prairies, most old-growth forests, most indigenous humans—would do it, but apparently not. As we see.
And, why? Faith in so-called superiors to think long-term is an addiction as sure as abusive relationships can be, as sure as alcoholism is. We think these people or these substances will guide us to salvation, but in our refusal to see the glaring and irredeemable violence that makes up their very nature, they steal from under us the ground we stand on, the foundation of our humanity and the possibility for a better life. The abuser steals self-respect, the alcohol steals personality, and the culture steals a living planet.
If our parents, our elders, and our leaders are not guaranteed to take responsibility for what may happen in times to come, then it falls on the rest of us. Elders are vital to any community, but if they only teach poison and passivity, we—the world, we—are better off without them.
Now is the time for us to look at the planet as it truly is and ask what it needs from us. It’s time to ask what the world will look like in five, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years, and what we can do to affect this. With global warming reaching a tipping point of irreversibility, with 200 species of life vanishing from the Earth every new day, it should be clear what kind of endpoint the current trajectory—the path either endorsed or unsuccessfully challenged by our parents—is leading to.
Liars will tell us to look away, but we must not. It will take unspeakable courage, but it is now or never to think for ourselves and, most importantly, to think for the future. After all, someone has to.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 8, 2012 | Alienation & Mental Health, Listening to the Land
By Alex Rose / Deep Green Resistance Cascadia
We won’t fight for what we don’t know. We won’t die for what we don’t love.
Members of normal communities, living communities, love their community. They love their neighbors. They love their sisters and brothers. They are willing to fight for their community. They are willing to die for it, to protect it, to preserve it.
But this culture takes us from our communities, the lands and families that we belong in, that we belong to. Not knowing them, not loving them, we stand by with a confusion and a pain, not knowing what to do as they’re put upon the rack, stretched and tortured, pulled and prodded, and eventually killed. We don’t know why we hurt. It’s a pain we can’t name, a pain that wells up in places we didn’t know were a part of us.
Pulled and torn apart, our communities are erased and destroyed. We are alone, with walls erected between us. Born and raised in this nightmare, we are all but unable to see it for what it is. We know little beyond the fear and loneliness of this culture, and are terrified of those Others, those inexplicably familiar figures we can’t help but glimpse through the fog that this culture wraps us in. Our terror and fear is molded into hate, and we become the stonemasons ourselves, forever building up the walls that separate us from everyone, everything else we once knew and loved, until these walls become our prisons, and we find ourselves living—locked—in perpetual and solitary confinement.
And this kills us, our isolation. It kills everything. This world of life built upon reciprocity, is murdered, slowly atomized and compartmentalized away to nothing. Stripped of meaning, we are all of us—human communities, watersheds, prairies and oceans—slowly and entirely stripped physically apart into oblivion.
But this isn’t how it has to be. This wandering pain and loneliness isn’t what we are; it is what we’ve become. But it’s not what we must be.
Go and listen to the land, she is calling you. Go stand in the rain and listen as it kisses your face. The wind blows, playing with your hair, and the trees are dancing. Go and sit and listen to them. Listen to the language we used to know.
Go and talk with the trees. Listen to the frogs and hummingbirds and cactus; they will tell you stories. They will tell you about who they are. They will tell you about who you are. Listen to them. Talk to them. Cry with them. Learn them and learn to love them.
This is not easy. Civilization is built on the isolation, the alienation from life that is killing everything worth loving. Feeling that love and that pain is deeply challenging to our manufactured sense of self, our identity and being, to our prisons.
But we need that love and pain. We need the world, both to live and for our lives to have meaning. And unless we learn to listen to it, to know it and to love it and come home to those living communities (those we’ve been told don’t really exist), we will watch—distantly, half-feeling and half-awake—as they slip from existence, while we struggle with a pain and a grief we can’t seem to name or explain.
They feed and shelter us, they teach us, they help us to become ourselves. We need them. We need to know and love them. We need to fight for and defend them. And many of us will have to die for them.
Our love cannot be static, for love is a verb, and it must call us to act. It is not enough to say who and what we love; we must show it by our actions. We must love our homes, our extra-human communities, and we must protect them from the omnicidal slaughter that is the dominant culture, civilization. If we don’t love them enough to stop their enslavement, imprisonment and murder—by any means necessary—then our love is a lie.
We are alive in a living world, a world dancing and humming. The talking, laughing, crying and singing, living and dying is there, all around us in the world. It is the world. And it is a world that calls for our participation, a world that wants to know and love us and wants us to know and love it.
Go and sit with the ocean, the mountains the desert, rivers, trees, frogs, finches, mushrooms, and rocks. Listen to them. Listen to them calling you back, back into being and back into community. Listen to their stories, their dreams, their wisdoms and their songs. Listen until you know them, and then keep listening. Know them, love them, find your home there with them and then fight, protect and defend them.
From Roots and Rain
