A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [114]
What do you do? Do you follow the trucker to a rest stop, and slash his tires while he uses the toilet? After all, he is wittingly or unwittingly lending his talents and time to an ecocidal project, to an institution actively committing genocide. And slashing his tires will slow the destruction, even if only ever so slightly. Or do you drive on, and wave and smile as you pass him? After all, he is simply a working man trying to earn his living, and support his family. The chances are good in any case that he harbors a more righteous and understanding hatred of the company than you do: that has been the case for the independent loggers, drivers, and mill owners I've known who've been forced to contract out to timber transnational. And slashing his tires will probably not accomplish much more than ruin the day of a semi-random person. Does that help? How do you make sense of this contradiction: that you have nothing against the man personally, and may be able to understand the reasons for his actions, but once again the tangible effects of his actions are to contribute to ecocide—the destruction of one's house—and genocide.
Is it a displacement of anger to act against this person?
Or how about this: do you find Charles Bingham's home address, and do you go there, and do you destroy his home as his decisions similarly destroy the homes of humans and nonhumans across the globe? Now that he has no home, and he can move anywhere, do you say to him, perhaps as the police lead you away, "I feel no apologies are necessary for offering the members of this family a choice as to where they will next live"? If you do this, what have you gained, and what has the world gained? Even though the destruction of his home is less of a sin—though more of a crime—than the destruction he causes (for three primary reasons: he has the money to relocate; he does not feel the unity with his land that his victims feel, or he could not commit ecocide; he is not without blame), is it a displacement of anger to act against this person?
Or how about this: do you systematically slash the tires—you and everyone you know—of every Weyerhaeuser vehicle you see? Do you do everything you can to drive Weyerhaeuser out of business? And when you're done with Weyerhaeuser, do you start over with Boise Cascade, then Potlatch, then Louisiana Pacific, then Georgia Pacific, then Daishowa, then Mitsubishi? Do you clearcut your way through timber transnationals with the same relentlessness with which they clearcut their way through living communities? And then do you choose another industry? Is this a displacement of anger?
Or do you do nothing? Do you write respectful letters to Weyerhaeuser executives politely requesting they stop deforesting—as Gandhi wrote respectfully to Hitler—and do you request also that Weyerhaeuser's executives stop the genocide they will not, and cannot, even admit? Do you write your congresspeople? Do you contribute twenty-five dollars to the Sierra Club, and go about your day? Do you write articles and books articulating the problems as clearly as you can, and hope it will make some difference? Is all this a displacement of anger? Or is it a denial of anger and a displacement of responsibility? Is all this as much as you can do? If salmon, tuna, or wolverine could take on human manifestation, what would they do?
I don't know where to place the anger. If Slade Gorton and Larry Craig, as I mentioned before, are tools for the enacting of atrocity, and if the same can be said, to greater or lesser degrees of culpability, for Charles Bingham, for George Weyerhaeuser, for those who lend their talents to Weyerhaeuser, for the institution of Weyerhaeuser itself, for all other transnational timber and other types of corporations, for all of us insofar as we participate