Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [128]
After the Unabomber sent bombs through the mail that killed three people and injured twenty-three more, the United States Postal Service responded by instituting regulations banning any package weighing more than a pound from being dropped into a mailbox, instead forcing patrons to stand in line before (eventually) handing a package to a postal clerk. The good news is that I enjoy the conversations.
Now to the Tylenol half of it. In 1982 seven people died after taking Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. Johnson and Johnson, the corporation that makes Tylenol, immediately recalled 31 million bottles of the pain reliever, at a cost of $125 million, and within a month and a half had designed new tamper-evident containers. The entire industry followed suit, until today nearly all consumables are packaged in similar containers.
What do these have to do with civilization killing the planet? Contrast the response to the Unabomber/Tylenol killings with the fact that air pollution from this country’s coal-fired power plants causes 24,000 premature deaths each year,232 or with the fact that global warming already kills tens of thousands of humans per year, or with the fact that dangerous products kill 28,000 Americans per year, exposure to dangerous chemicals and other unsafe conditions in the workplace kills another 100,000, and workplace carcinogens cause 28 to 33 percent of all cancer deaths in this country.233 Contrast the Unabomber/Tylenol responses with the response by the government to the 240,000 Americans who will die over the next thirty years from asbestos-related cancers, the 100,000 miners who have died from black lung, the one million infants worldwide who died just in 1986 because they were bottle-fed instead of breastfed.234
Threats to a comparatively small number of people were responded to almost immediately. The threats were removed. Why? Because the threats were aberrations and not systematic. The solutions did not point toward problems that inhere in the system itself. Had the problems inhered in the system itself, not only would the problems not have been solved, but almost no one would even have noticed.
In related news, during the years since the September 11 bombings, the FBI has “reduced by nearly 60% the number of agents assigned to white-collar crime, public corruption and related work,”235 transferring these agents to terrorism investigations, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that corporate crimes cost orders of magnitude more��both in lives and in dollars—than either street crime or “terrorism.”
Instead of the Unabomber/Tylenol rule, I could have called it the Fantasy Football rule, or maybe the Rotisserie League rule. The Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front are considered by the FBI to be together the nation’s number one domestic terrorist threat, even though they’ve never hurt anyone. The feds’ rationale is that the ELF and ALF have caused significant financial loss to corporations. And it is true that some members of the ELF—elves—seem proud of the fact that the ELF has cost corporations and the government tens of millions of dollars through “economic sabotage.” I hate to break it to both the elves and the G-men, but that’s comparatively trivial compared to the real terrorists. I am of course describing those who play fantasy football and baseball. According to a scoop in today’s San Francisco Chronicle , “America’s addiction to fantasy sports could cost the nation’s businesses $36.7 million daily”236 as people who “should” be working are