All you need is love (and a small, well-trained army?)

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To me, the following quote reads like poetry... so that’s how I’ll present it:

Whenever any form of 

government 

becomes destructive, 

it is the right of the people 

to alter or to abolish it, 

and to institute new government, 

laying its foundation 

on such principles 

and organizing its powers 

in such form, 

as to them 

shall seem 

most likely to effect 

their safety 

and happiness

---

In her excellent 1995 book, Bridge of Courage, Jennifer Harbury quotes a Guatemalan freedom fighter named Gabriel, responding to a plea to embrace non-violent resistance: 

“In my country, child malnutrition is close to 85 percent. Ten percent of all children will be dead before the age of five, and this is only the number actually reported to government agencies. Close to 70 percent of our people are functionally illiterate. There is almost no industry in our country — you need land to survive. Less than 3 percent of our landowners own over 65 percent of our land. In the last fifteen years or so, there have been over 150,000 political murders and disappearances… Don’t talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn’t have survived a week here. There was a peaceful movement for progress here, once. They were crushed. We were crushed. For Gandhi’s method to work, there must be a government capable of shame. We lack that here.”

Repeat after me: We lack that here. 

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In his two-volume book, Endgame, author Derrick Jensen tells of a discussion he had with a longtime activist. He writes:

She told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon. All too predictably, the dedicated demonstrators assembled to protest the toxic spraying were, “like clockwork,” ignored by the helicopter pilots. Both humans and the landscape ended up thoroughly doused with Agent Orange—time and time again. 

The protest campaign obviously had no effect, so a different approach was taken. “A bunch of Vietnam vets lived in those hills,” the activist told Jensen, “and they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhauser, Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, ‘“e know the names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses.’”“You know what happened next?” she asked. 

“I think I do,” I responded. 

“Exactly,” she said. “The spraying stopped.”

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Finally, another “poem” of sorts, this one from Ward Churchill: 

You’ve got to learn 

that when you push people around, 

some people push back. 

As they should. 

As they must. 

And as they undoubtedly will. 

There is justice

in such symmetry. 

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All you need is love…

But, as in tennis, sometimes only having love means you’re losing.