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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.
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.”
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.
All you need is love…
But, as in tennis, sometimes only having love means you’re losing.
As I was sitting in my deer stand this week I was wondering if our media and hyperventilating pols have any idea what an actual insurrection would look like? I know a vast majority of my fellow Americans know what that would look like, notwithstanding the urban liberal pining after gun control.
"Wide open heart, big fucking fence" (is what I say to my kids regularly). There was a time where I was interested in the concept of non-violence, I learned as much as I could so that I could start practicing it in my life. The more I learned about it the more I realized how inappropriate it was for what needs to happen in my life.
"To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself." Edith Eger, The Choice