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 | Jan 1, 2013 | Gender
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
My best friend died at twenty years old. He, like so many males, was set to explode; a bomb of manhood with a wick as short as impulse. He was taught only one game: breaking boundaries. In the end he broke his own. Game over.
Masculinity is killing us all. In men’s endless drive to prove themselves as real men, they must break boundaries as a matter of course. “Don’t do that” is simply an invitation. Each inhibition crossed is a further affirmation of manhood. There’s a reason why a certain major firearm company’s main marketing ploy revolves around convincing men that, without these guns, their “manhood cards” will be revoked. Like bombs, men don’t simply hurt themselves when they explode, but also whoever happens to be nearby. That’s the point.
Power is addictive. The more men taste it, the more they grasp for it and the more they cling to it. But masculinity kills them just as surely. Beneath the toxic exterior of ego, men need what all humans do: communion. There is no communion in violation. After all that can be violated is, what remains?
Yet, some men are different. Some men want back the empathy that was long ago stolen from them by the cult of masculinity.
I’d like to say my best friend lived with humanity. He certainly did when I met him. We were 7 years old, and I just moved to town. I asked him to be my best friend, and he agreed. We played and played for years: by the river, in the woods, with a baseball, with skateboards. Gratitude radiated from me and I was sure our friendship would last forever.
The friendship ended years before he died. As teenagers, everything changed between us. He was fully immersed in a conversion from a human being to a man. The culprits were men everywhere: his father, his older brother, the boys at school, the boys on the streets, popular culture. The lessons: pornography, substance use, machismo. It didn’t take long before he was teaching them to me, a true disciple of the manhood gospel. But I was scared. He resented my tepidness and made it known. I tried and tried to care, but it was all too much, too soon. I gave up trying to be this real man he wanted me to be. That was the end of our friendship.
It comes as little surprise to me now to hear of my old friends winding up dead, in prison, or on their way to one or the other—tragic to be sure, but surprising, no. These are merely the logical endpoints on the trajectory of masculinity; its fate, if you will. My friends were set to explode, and they never found their way to defusing the inevitable.
For years, memories of my best friend troubled me, no, tormented me. Daily, I relived this or that disturbing interaction: the first time he showed me pornography, the first time he had me smoke cigarettes, the time he almost set my house on fire by playing pyro, the time he landed us both at the police station because he fired a bee-bee gun at some neighborhood children, and on and on. Such memories confused me: why did I take part in these things? But they also angered me: why did he make me?
Not only was he in my memories, but also my dreams. In that realm, however, it was entirely different. In the dreams he was usually kind, even seeking of my approval.
Such was the case in the dream I had the night of his death. After waking up, my old friend very much on my mind, I checked my phone to find a message from a mutual acquaintance: our friend has overdosed on heroine. He was sorry to have to tell me, but assured me he would let me know about the funeral once details were set. Never before that moment, nor any time since, have I felt devastated in just that way.
Instantly, my feelings about my old best friend shifted. All the contempt that had built up in me for his wrong-doings transformed into something else. Yes, he was still to blame for all the hurt he’d undoubtedly done to others (most especially the women in his life). But it was not him, that little human being who agreed to my friendship all those years ago, that marked this path. No. He was set to explode. I lay the blame at the feet of the whole culture of masculinity; they are the ones who lit the wick.
My best friend died from manhood, as so many others do. Some die from abiding by it, but more die from it being used like a weapon against them (and too often, this is no metaphor). My friend ran his course of a fast and dangerous life, hurting others, but killing himself. There are many more like him out there, hurting and hurting just to try to feel alive. Those who could, rarely tell them to stop. Those who could, rarely show them another way.
Men who break boundaries must be stopped. Of course masculinity hurts men by tricking them out of their humanity, but it’s nothing compared to the plight of its victims. I mourn my old friend’s death, yes, but there are many, many others to mourn as well, for what he did to them. I’m not certain that he ever would have changed, though I know he could have. And that’s the problem.
Ours is a culture of violation. Women, children, other cultures, and other species pay for the exploits of the dominators. Men—like my old friend—serve simply as masculinity’s foot soldiers. They may think they are benefiting as individuals, but in the end, they are slaves to a force that kills their empathy, kills their loved ones, and eventually, kills them.
This world needs universal human rights and universal justice. In a culture based on these, my friend would not be dead, nor would he have learned violation as a means of survival. Instead of universalizing manhood, we need to universalize an indivisible respect for the boundaries of all others.
It’s too late for my best friend. The damage—both to him and to others at his hands—is done. But the masculinity culpable for the harm thrives more than ever, which is to say there is no better time for it to stand trial for all its crimes against life. Masculinity was thought up by men and it can be dismantled by all of us. Men can reclaim their humanity; they can have the kind of honesty I saw in the eyes of my seven-year-old best friend when he made that pact to stand by me. None of us can afford any less than the end of manhood.
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 | Dec 1, 2012 | Human Supremacy
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
I’ll tell you, if there is one instinct
I just can’t get with at all
It’s the urge to kill something beautiful
Just to hang it on your wall
—Ani DiFranco
Mangled. Squished flat. The sides of roads are littered with the bodies of unexpecting mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, nieces, nephews, lovers, and friends. There is nothing but callous disregard in the speeding hunks of metal that hurl down the highway. Lost forever are the stolen lives of too many raccoons, mice, snakes, birds, opossums, skunks, deer, and lizards. Add to this to the unthinkable toll of bees, moths, caterpillars, ants and others whose small bodies are barely noticed unless they are being scraped from a windshield.
The same callous disregard tortures 9 billion animals every year in factory farms around the world. Can you imagine being locked in a filthy cage with so many other bodies that you can’t even turn around or lie down? Can you imagine having your throat slit while you are still conscious? Can you imagine being plunged into scalding-hot water while your body is skinned or hacked apart while you are still conscious? This is the daily reality for so many cows, calves, pigs, chickens, ducks, and geese whose lives are as important to them as ours are to us.
The same callous disregard tortures tens of millions animals every year in vivisection labs on college campuses and research facilities around the world. Can you imagine being dissected, infected, injected, gassed, burned and blinded by doctors? Can you imagine if this was justified as “important research” for the purpose of testing the safety of make-up and dish soap? This is the daily reality for so many primates, dogs, cats, rabbits, and rodents whose lives are as important to them as ours are to us.
The same callous disregard is responsible for other atrocities: poaching (we’ve all seen the pictures of baby seals being clubbed), deep sea trawling (90% of large fish have been decimated), and the turning of whole habitats into buildings or fields of agriculture (the North American Prairie, once home to millions of bison, is now 2% of its original size).
Most of us in industrial society can go through our days relatively shielded from the real processes of life. And many of us are shielded too from the reality of suffering that this way of life—industrial civilization—forces so many nonhumans to endure. This, combined with the war on empathy perpetrated by the dominant culture, makes it easy for most people to ignore the suffering or dismiss it as something insignificant. How many times have you heard it said that other animals simply cannot feel as much or in the same ways as human beings can? You’ve seen the pain yourself; it was clear in the eyes of the furred and feathered as they slipped away from this world as surely as any human being. But the ruling religion of this culture is human supremacy (however, you may also call it Christianity or Science). And human supremacy demands that you are wrong, that your empathy is but misplaced and silly.
Roadkill is more difficult to ignore. There they lay; not behind the doors of a slaughterhouse or vivisection lab, nor in the remote regions of the oceans and forests. On the sides of the roads, they are murdered, left motionless with a frightened look on a deformed face, guts spilling from the chest. Not so different from you, really. I mean, let’s say it’s you who lives in the forest; the one which roads now slice through like so many knives. You crossed the road for hunting early in the day, but now you want to come home. As you step from the soil onto the pavement, you are swimming in thoughts of your loved ones, your resting place, your life waiting for you just steps ahead. But you never make it there. No. In a flash, your body is torn from its path, destined now only to rot on the road’s shoulder. There you lay.
Within the clumps of mangled fur and feathers is a history, a family, a community, a wisdom, a life more rich and beautiful than most any vehicular passerby cares to pay a thought to.
Industrial capitalism functions by devaluing life. It couldn’t survive any other way. The system is based on production, a euphemism for the transformation of living creatures into dead commodities. Mountaintops become soda cans. Old-growth forests become 2x4s. Alligators become handbags.
If the dominant narrative fails to see, or more likely actively ignores, the sacredness of life, then roadkill isn’t a subject worth a moment’s consideration. It’s just part of having roads and cars, the narrative says, as if roads are more real than living, breathing creatures, as if any human being is entitled to decide the fate of whole other populations. Can we not imagine living without roads and cars, but so easily accelerate towards a future without the two hundred species of plants and animals that go extinct every day?
I want to ask how someone can simply not grieve death. But, then I’d have to ask how a whole culture has been built on the systematic destruction of the place it relies on. There is no rational answer for a phenomenon so insane.
In his book, Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack Forbes argues that the death urge of the dominant culture can only be truly explained as a very real disease, one which he calls the wetiko (or cannibal) psychosis. This disease, Forbes says, is the “greatest epidemic sickness known to [humans].” He goes on, “Imperialists, rapists, and exploiters are not just people who have strayed down a wrong path. They are insane (unclean) in the true sense of that word. They are mentally ill and, tragically, the form of soul-sickness that they carry is catching.” The sadism of torturing nonhumans is a perfect example of the wetiko. Those who run factory farms and vivisection labs carry the disease and spread it throughout the culture until it seems just part of life.
Experiencing the sight of roadkill was a major step in my own reclamation of the empathy that is my birthright as a human animal. It helped to kick-start the decolonization of my heart and mind, the endless process of rooting out the wetiko sickness from my being. The injustice is just too glaring to ignore. I remember distinctly one day when I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car and I spotted up ahead a dead raccoon in the middle of the road. A half-mile up the road were her two children, also dead. My heart burned, instinctively. Were those tears in my eyes?
Since then, I’ve seen the flames of so much life needlessly extinguished. It never ceases to hurt, nor to motivate a spirit of resistance.
Here’s one story, this one from just the other day: I’m walking in the small forest near my home. From ten yards, I see the unmistakable white face of an opossum. She’s lying still on her side in the middle of the trail. I approach and see her glassy eyes looking straight ahead. I’ve heard of opossums “playing dead,” whereby they may feign death for up to four hours when scared. But, I’m pretty sure that this one is truly dead. This is affirmed when I return to the grave site a few days later.
I don’t know how this opossum died. There were no predator marks on the body, and the middle of a highly frequented trail seems a peculiar place to make a death bed. Something forced this situation. Maybe it’s the poisons put on lawns, or the fact that this half-acre of trees is surrounded on all sides by cars and roads and houses. Opossums are indigenous to this land and under assault as surely as indigenous human cultures are. In the native Powhatan language, opossum is derived from the word apasum, which means “white animal.” They’ve long been the largest population of marsupials in the Western Hemisphere. But now, civilization encroaches upon the homes of all nonhumans, and opossums, despite adapting as scavengers, now struggle against a massive decrease in food and habitat.
Inexperienced urbanite that I am, I don’t know what to do with the body. Should I just leave and let someone else deal with it? But, if not me, whoever finds the opossum will call animal control services to dispose of the body, meaning it will ultimately end up in a landfill or incinerator. I know this creature would prefer to stay in the forest. Like all place-based beings, she would want to fulfill her sacred task of giving back her body to the land which has always given her the sustenance of life.
Pressed to move quickly enough to avoid the concern of trail-goers sure to show up at any moment, I contemplate my options. Seeing some large maple leaves on the forest floor, I have an idea. I stop to pick them up and, with a leaf covering each hand like a raggedy glove, I pick up the opossum. With a slight strain, I’m able to move her to the side of the trail. There, I pile leaves on top of her and make a small enclave around the mound with fallen branches. Here is a grave, however feeble my attempt.
After the opossum’s body was sufficiently hidden from human passerby, I was moved to say a few words of respect. In my exasperated state, I thought only to say something simple like, “rest easy, friend.”
The opossum deserved more. The passing of life into death deserves a deep respect and commemoration. There’s nothing so humbling. This is what is missing in the dominant culture, and what we all need to learn once again. If I could go back in time, and if I had the words, this is what I wish I had said.
Your life is not in vain. In all your time of living, you’ve contributed to the health and diversity of this place, and thus, to the health and diversity of the world. There are those of my species who not only fail to give back in this way, but actively destroy the world which gives them life. They are insane. They must be stopped. Your life, and all life, is sacred and infinitely more important than industrial civilization. I’m sorry that you had to live your final moments surrounded by this unnatural and immoral construct. I’m sorry that you did not get to properly say goodbye to this world. Your life is not in vain.
I’d like to extend my humble prayer to all victims of highways, factory farms, vivisection labs, and industrial extraction. Life requires death, but none so ruthless. This culture is a project sustained only by death. It thrives by never allowing the renewal of life. These are sadistic murders caused by human hubris rather than the natural deaths simply part of life.
I’ll say it again: Death is part of life. All beings go through the motions of being first predators, then prey. Everyone has to eat. Death is necessary to complete the cycle that renews life. That is, death in a world in balance. Industrial civilization, by design, ruins that balance. It preys not just on individuals, but on whole landbases, and not for the necessary sustenance required by living beings, but because it is driven by a death urge, by the wetiko psychosis.
And does it require saying that life wants to live? I know the people who think up vivisection and factory farms have become so deadened as to have forgotten this, or believe it true only when applied to humans (but even then, how alive can a human really be when daily life consists of being a torturer?). You, however, should know better. You should know that, as Derrick Jensen eloquently writes, “Life so completely wants to live. And to the degree that we ourselves are alive, and to the degree that we consider ourselves among and allied with the living, our task is clear: to help life live.”
Here’s another story. My friend saw a deer who was hit so hard that he flew into another oncoming car. The impact literally tore his legs from his body. And yet another story: A doe stood on the side of the road mourning the body of her friend who had just been struck. This is their land. The roads and this civilization are ever-expanding—it’s a war, plain and simple. Just look on the side of the road. You’ll see.
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 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.
