Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [135]
The crowd gave him a standing ovation.
Let’s just hope they convert his words into actions.
I think it would be virtually impossible for even the most dogmatic pacifist to make a moral argument against immediately taking down every cell phone tower in the world. Cell phones are, of course, annoying as hell. That might be a good enough reason to take down the towers, but there are even better reasons. There is of course the very real possibility that tower transmissions cause cancer and other health problems to humans and nonhumans alike. Even ignoring this, however, there’s the fact that towers—cell phone, radio, and television—act as mass killing machines for migratory songbirds: 5 to 50 million per year.254 These birds die so the jerk at the table next to you can yammer at full volume (of course) about his latest financial conquest (thank god this time the conquest isn’t sexual or you might soon be arraigned for murder). Now, I’m sure some hypothetical pacifist could assemble some hypothetical situation where cell phones save lives. For example, a woman is alone on a dark country road. Her car breaks down. She dials 911, then turns on the radio to pass the time while she waits for a cop to show up. She hears a report of a homicidal madman who escaped from a local prison (he was in prison because budgets for mental hospitals were gutted during the Reagan era, and no, silly, she doesn’t hear that on the radio: radio stations are owned by large corporations, and would never provide useful political analysis). He—the madman, not Reagan—likes to kill women on dark lonely roads (Reagan preferred killing poor brown people, and those at a distance, and no, that analysis doesn’t come from the radio either). He has only one hand, the other being a hook he uses for awful purposes at which the radio only hints. She shivers. Finally the cop arrives, approaches her driver’s side window. She checks his hands before she rolls it down just a fraction. She pops her hood from inside, he fiddles a moment, the car miraculously starts. He drops the hood, gets back in his car. She drives away, feeling a slight tug on her car as she does. When she gets home she looks at the passenger side, and finds, of course, a bloody hook stuck to the handle of her car door. Saved by a cell phone!
I recognize that we can construct much less fabulous cases: almost a third of 911 calls (almost 50 percent in big cities) come from cell phones.255
My point, however, is that we can just as easily construct hypothetical situations that will keep us from doing anything. The same woman, for example, driving alone down a dark country road, picks up her cell phone to call her dear elderly mother. Her mother shuffles to answer, falls down the stairs, and breaks her neck, but is able to grab the phone and gasp, “Dial 911.” Her daughter picks up her second cell phone (you do have multiple cell phones, don’t you?), begins to dial, and because she’s not paying attention to her driving, plows into three orphan waifs huddling for warmth, security, and comfort by the side of the road, leaving them all paralyzed from the neck down. (Because they have no health insurance, and because politicians steadfastly refuse to put in place universal health coverage, they all soon die). Her car hurtles across a ditch, wiping out the last population of a highly endangered salamander, then smashes into a tree. She hears her mother’s dying gasps, and as she loses consciousness she sees a hook shining in the moonlight outside her passenger window. The madman, by the way, did not have a thing for children or salamanders, meaning that they