Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [143]
Although the farmers ultimately lost—the power lines have been operating for two decades now—over the next two years they knocked down ten more towers, and shot out thousands of insulators.
Dissatisfied even with victory, the power corporations wanted to make sure no one would ever again challenge their hegemony. In the words of Philip Martin, “We got the federal government to pass the law” that it’s a federal crime to take down a tower transmitting electricity across state lines.
I’m sitting again by the cell phone towers, and this time I’m thinking, I could do this. There are, as with so many activities we may find intimidating, several categories of barriers to action. There’s the intellectual: I must convince myself it’s necessary. There’s the emotional: I must feel it’s necessary. There’s the moral: I must know it’s right. There’s the consequential: I must be willing and prepared to deal with the effects of my actions. Related to this, there’s the fearful: I must be willing to cross barriers of fear, both tangible, real, present-day fears and conditioned fears that feel just as real and present but are not (e.g., if I wanted to go waterskiing, which I don’t, I would have to face not only whatever fears I might have of speeding behind a boat, but my visceral repulsion to waterskiing based on beatings associated with it when I was a child: there is no longer any danger of my father hitting anyone if I were to go waterskiing, but it still feels like there is. How many of our other fears have been inculcated into us by our families or the culture at large?). There’s the technical: I must figure out how best to proceed. There are undoubtedly others I can’t think of.
For someone to act—and this is a generic process, applying as much to asking someone out as to weeding a garden as to writing a book as to removing cell phone towers as to dismantling the entire infrastructure that supports this deathly system of slavery—each of these barriers to action must be overcome or sometimes simply bypassed in moments of great embodiedness, identification, and feeling (e.g., if someone were attempting to strangle me [with bare hands, as opposed to the toxification of my total environment] my movement through these various barriers to action would of necessity be visceral and immediate: no pondering, just reaching for the pen to stab into his eye).
Sure, I don’t know how to take down a cell phone tower. But that’s not why I don’t act. A purpose of this book is to help me and perhaps others examine and, if appropriate, move past these other barriers to leave us only with the technical questions of how to, because so often how to is actually the easiest question, the smallest barrier.
I could take out a cell phone tower. So could you. We’re not stupid (I’m presuming no members of the current Administration have made it this far in the book). And while our first few attempts may not be pretty—you’ll notice I don’t show you the first stories I ever wrote (at the time, my mother said they were good, yet now we both laugh when she says, “They were terrible, but I could never tell you that”) and even now I don’t show you my first drafts—but we would learn, just as we learn to do any technical task. I’m certain that if I made as many birdhouses as I write pages, not even David Flagg could laugh at them.
Practice makes perfect. This is as true of taking down cell phone towers as of writing. And fortunately, there are a lot of cell phone towers (I bet you never thought you’d see me append fortunately to a statement like that!). According to some estimates there are 138,000 cell phone towers in the U.S. (more than 48,000 of which are over two hundred feet tall261), plus radio and television towers. And the number of American cell phone users