A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [106]
"But," I said, "What about Anne Frank? She would still be alive." I recalled a photograph I'd seen of an unknown member of the French Resistance murdered by the Gestapo in September 1944. The photograph showed only his back, and the razor marks of his torture. He would have lived. "It's fine," I continued, "to talk about historical forces, but what about this person, or this person, or this person, each an individual, each dead because we hesitated to kill Hitler?"
"What are you going to do?" George asked, "Kill everybody who helped him? And what about Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in Zaire, Hussein in Iraq, Schwarzkopf and Bush for that matter? What about Reagan? His policies were every bit as genocidal as Hitler's. Are you going to kill each of them? And if you do, what about you?"
"If I would have killed Hitler, the Gestapo would have killed me. Not my first choice for how to die, but I would have needed to prepare for that possibility."
"That's not what I mean," he said. "If you kill Hitler, or if you kill all of them, what does that make you?"
Silence stretched between us. I thought of the story George told about the Buddha committing murder, but in this moment that didn't seem to help. Finally, I said, "A killer."
I thought again of the immense gap that separates those who do not destroy from those who do. That gap is one of the reasons for the success and contagion of the cannibal sickness, because cannibals have fewer problems killing than noncannibals, and especially because the cannibals have trapped us in an alley with two dead ends. If we fail to fight them we die, and if we fight them we run the risk of becoming them.
Another problem with violence is its finality.
When I'm on the road, I always carry a baseball bat in the back of my truck to use each time I see a snake. If the snake is sunning herself, I stop the truck and use the bat to shoo her to safety. Sometimes, if the snake is especially sluggish, I loop her over the bat and carry her out of traffic. If she's already dead I don't use the bat at all, but carry her to my truck, then take her to some quiet spot where she can lie to decompose with dignity. But most often when I stop I have to use the bat not to save the snake but kill her. Too many times I've seen them live and writhing with broken backs, flattened vertebrae, even crushed heads.
Early this spring I came across a garter snake sunning at the edge of a road. He didn't move as I approached. I nudged him with my toe and he still didn't move. Peering more closely, I saw that his head looked strange in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. I prodded him again. Still nothing. The closer I looked the more I thought his back must be broken.
I got the bat and struck him.
But I was wrong. He wasn't injured. Only cold. When I smashed his head he writhed for all he was worth on the pavement. Of course now I had no choice but to finish killing him. I cannot now pass that spot without thinking of the mistake I made, and especially of the finality of that mistake. I can go on, and I can shoo snakes off the road in the future. But this one is dead. I do not like the fact that my wrong decision cost this snake his life.
Recently I came across three quotes that reveal much about our culture. The first, from the October 26, 1939, issue of the newspaper Daily Sketch, describes our economics in a nutshell: "New York Stock Exchange had a boom yesterday following Von Ribbentrop's speech at Danzig. Wall Street interprets the speech as meaning a long war. Stocks rose almost to the highest levels of the year."
The second, from Winston Churchill, describes