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By Root 1260 0

The necessity of silencing victims before, during, and after exploitation or annihilation, and the necessity at these same times of silencing one's own conscience and one's conscious awareness of relationship is undeniable. These radically different atrocities share mechanisms of silencing; science, for example, has been used as efficiently to silence women as it has Jews as it has trees as it has rocks as it has children, chimpanzees, the elderly, our dreams, our common sense, and our sense of the sacrality of community. The same can be said for the uses of our religion, economics, politics, and so on. The perpetrators of these atrocities share a deeply unifying belief in their own separateness and superiority, and a tightly rationalized belief in the rightness of their actions. The perpetrators share a deep fear of interconnection and of the unpredictability of a life that may end in death tomorrow, or not for a hundred years, but one that will nonetheless end.

The psychologist Erich Fromm changed Descartes' dictum from "I think, therefore I am," to "I affect, therefore I am." If Gilgamish can cut down a forest, if he can make a name for himself, he has affected the world around him. If Hitler can "purify" the Aryan "race," if he can become the progenitor of a thousand-year Reich, he has, too. If my father can make my teenage sister wet her pants from fear and pain, or if he can make me take his penis against my skin—and more broadly if he can destroy our souls . . . you get the picture. Frederick Weyerhaeuser (acting now through the unliving yet immortal corporate proxy that bears his name) deforested first the Midwest, then the Northwest, and now wants the world. Fearful of life, the perpetrators forget that one can affect another with love, by allowing another's life to unfold according to its own nature and desires and fate, and by giving to the other what it needs to unfold. One can affect another by merely being present and listening intently to that other. All of this is true whether we speak of forests, children, rocks, rivers, stars, and wolverines, or races, cultures, and communities of human beings.

In the same speech where he said there are only two races— the decent and the indecent—Viktor Frankl also said, "Every nation is capable [of the] Holocaust." As we have seen, this is true.

My father is not Hitler, he is not the head of Weyerhaeuser, nor is he Gilgamish. But to deny they have anything in common is to refuse to see. To insist that each of these perpetrators is somehow an aberration—to try to remove each individually from the cultural context that creates them all—is to not merely facilitate but to make inevitable the continuation of their atrocities. It is to believe, even as we walk down the corridor toward the sputtering sound of rifles, that miraculously, our turn will never come.

I feel conflicted about my newfound understanding of the flaws of historical revolutions. On one hand it's important to understand the past, so we can at least try not to repeat mistakes. On the other, I'm not sure how understanding what's wrong will help us determine what's right.

In my mind, I keep seeing the face of my high school friend Jon—now an avid pursuer of ever-larger American Dreams— and I keep hearing his voice in my head, sharply teasing, "So, the Russian Revolution was a scam? Our Founding Fathers were hypocrites? Stop the presses! Anybody who doesn't understand that revolutions are like revolving doors, where one boss steps in when another steps out, shouldn't be talking about revolutions. You've got to get what you can in the meantime. Make yourself comfortable."

His voice continues, "How does your analysis help? Instead of new bosses taking over production, you want to stop production altogether? Does the word starvation mean anything to you? And what do you think would happen if you walked into an Eagle Hardware Store—motto: More of Everything—and announced you wanted the customers, never mind the owners, to give up their jet skis and jacuzzis, their three hundred types of track lighting and economy-size