Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [141]
Where is this sheriff when environmentalists need him? Would that sheriffs would always defend local humans against distant corporations, or at the very least not enforce the ends of these corporations through violence.
The governor also refused to intervene. That’s where things stood when a new governor took office that winter. Things looked good for the farmers: the new governor considered himself a populist. As one farmer said, “He thought of himself as representative of the people, with a capital P, not of the bureaucracy or the bigwigs or the business people, and so he had, I think, a great hope and belief that he could get people together and solve the problems.”
But when politicians present themselves as representatives of regular people it’s time to start packing (either your luggage so you can flee, or a pistol, so you can, well, you know . . . You choose which).
The governor took to slipping off in secret to visit farmers at their homes. He told them he sympathized, and said, “You really got stuck in this case.”
Philip Martin, head of United Power Association, sympathized too. He’d grown up on a farm, and he even knew and loved Virgil’s mother—“She reminded me somewhat of my own mother,” he said—but as from the beginning of civilization the demands of this deathly economic system trumped all human cares, feelings, and needs. Demand for electricity was growing by 10 percent per year, construction of the lines had already begun, and the clock was ticking on interest on a $900 million federal loan. The logic was, “I may love my mother, but if the economic system—and more broadly civilization—demands it (or hell, even hints at it) I’ll screw her over and leave her for dead.”
Martin was clear on the source and solution of the problem: “We built all the way across North Dakota and we had one person protesting it. That was solved when the law enforcement—he did some damage—and the law enforcement there initiated the action to put him in prison, or jail. And pretty soon he said, ‘I’ll be a good boy, I won’t do anything more,’ and they let him out, and we built a transmission line. We didn’t have any problem in North Dakota.”
But, he continued, in Minnesota, “The law enforcement refused to enforce their own laws. We would go out and try to survey, and they would simply pull up all our stakes, they would destroy everything we had out there.259 And there was never anything done. President Norberg, who was president of the cooperative, and I were out there at many meetings. I drove a car with an escort in front of it and back of it with guns going off, sticking out the windows.”
The farmers said the transmission lines would come in over their dead bodies. They filed more lawsuits, which went to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided against them. This journey through the courts radicalized many of the farmers, who up to that point had believed in the system. One farmer stated: “I had the feeling that it was all decided. The courts weren’t acting as courts at all, they were just a front. And it was just a terrible, terrible shock to me. I thought, gee, this can’t be.”260
That November, construction started in western Minnesota. When farmers protested, the corporations filed $500,000 lawsuits against them.
The farmers found allies, from former Vietnam War protesters to Quakers to musicians. The corporations, of course, already had allies in the court system, and now the governor, and through him police with guns.