We may as well acknowledge that we're all fucked. I don't mean this in the delightful sense of lovers...meeting in the middle of their hearts and minds and bodies, but in the sense that we're in far more trouble than words can say. Wild salmon are disappearing, as are great apes, coral reefs, native earthworms, wild forests, wild places of all stripes. Last week two more chunks of Antarctica fell into the sea. Dioxin contaminates polar bear fat, and it contaminates mother's milk. Three corporations control more than eighty percent of the beef market, and seven corporations control more than ninety percent of the grain market. Military scientists have placed computer chips in the brains of rats, and can force the creatures to go left, right, backward, forward by pushing buttons on keyboards...
We're fucked. We all know the numbers. We know that twenty-five percent of all women in this culture are raped within their lifetime, and another nineteen percent have to fend off rape attempts. Which means of course that unless one guy is excruciatingly busy, an awful lot of men are rapists...
We know also that 565,000 American children are killed or injured every year by their parents or guardians. We know, too, that there are more slaves in the world today than came across on the Middle Passage. And we know that in the 1830s a slave in the American South cost between $500 and $1000, the equivalent of $50,000 to $100,000 today. And now a slave costs about $50, making them not even a capital but a simple expense, to be used up and thrown away.
We're fucked.
If we're so fucked, one might reasonably ask, why not just go ahead and off ourselves?...the answer: life is good. Life is really, really good. Not mediated life. Not televisions, cars, stereos, jobs, professional sports, colognes, perfumes, skyscrapers, steel, asphalt, brick, mortar. But life. Waking up with the sun on your face. Tasting your lover's sweat. Stubbing your toe, petting a dog...helping your mother plant her garden, feeling your body grow heavy at the end of a hard day, and waiting to catch up to your dreams. But to merely reside in the sensual as the world burns isn't good enough. Nor is it good enough merely to mourn the losses both inside and out. Both of these are necessary, but not sufficient...If things are so bad, one can also ask (this time unreasonably, I think), why not just withdraw into the sensual, why not just party (or cry)? Because...this question reveals nothing neither more nor less than an inability to love. If you're in love, with your life, with your body, with your lover, with the tree outside your door, with the world that gives rise to all of these, the fact that we're all deeply, deeply fucked doesn't matter a damn to your actions: if you're in love, you act to protect your beloved. If we are to survive, we must recliam our planet from those corporations which-and people who-are destroying it. But even before this, we must reclaim our own bodies and our hearts from that same grasp. -
Derrick Jensen, May 2002
[*photos from my Admirable things folder...found who-knows-where. Yours? Ask me to remove 'em or give you due credit and I will gladly do so. <3]
The past couple of weeks have been all hammock-lounging, Gibran and Psalms-reading, campfire smoke-inhaling, UTI-healing, whole wheat bread-baking, LOST theorizing, cat fur-wrangling, (gladly) pollen-sneezing, clutter downsizing, and plan-making. So the normal routine, plus a few seasonal additions..and the UTI brought on by too many ginseng root beers last week. (I knew better.)
Four little tomato plants have sprouted in the container garden, plus about a million lettuce plants. The artichokes are hanging in there, but the wildflowers are looking a little floppy.
Last night Marvin and I went to dinner with my co-workers and a rep from NOW foods. They talked a lot about things that happened before Marv and I were born, but none of the terribly exciting topics. I zoned out and kept trying to remember what it was like to be an egg and a sperm and not a whole person, but failed. We left saying that it was time for our
Mad Men marathon date, but it was loud in the restaurant and Louie's husband thought we sad
Batman marathon. We didn't tell him otherwise.
Back to the hammock and the breeze.
LOVE,
Sarah.
P.S. - Andrea, I found ANOTHER band-aid in the pair of shoes of yours I inherited at the junk swap a couple of years ago. This makes, what? half a dozen band-aids out of a single pair of shoes! It's starting to get a bit eerie because each time I'm positive that I've gotten the last of the band-aids out...but then another one magically appears a few months later. Is it voodoo that youdoo?
