Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [176]
At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q & A and announced that the only reason people ever become activists is to make themselves feel better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn’t matter, he said, and it’s egotistical to think it does. He trotted out the old line about how the natural world doesn’t need our help. At least he averred that the natural world exists, as opposed to being the movement of some god’s eyebrows, but the end result was the same old narcissism.
I told him I disagreed.
He asked, “Doesn’t activism make you feel good?”
“Of course, but that’s not why I do it. If I only want to feel good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the real world.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy stream bottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t matter to whether you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love. And if I don’t act to protect my landbase, I’m not fully human.”
A while back I got an email from someone in Spokane, Washington. He said his fifteen-year-old son was wonderfully active in the struggle for ecological and social sanity. But, the father continued, “I want to make sure he stays active, so I feel the need to give him hope. This is a problem, because I don’t feel any hope myself, and I don’t want to lie to him.”
I told him not to lie, and said if he wants his son to stay active, he shouldn’t try to give him hope, but instead to give him love. If his son learns how to love, he will stay active.
A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place.317 You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you, nor did it make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems somehow get solved, through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing what’s necessary to solve your problems yourself.
Because of industrial civilization, human sperm counts have been cut in half over the last fifty years. At the same time, girls have begun to enter puberty earlier: 1 percent of three-year-old girls have begun to develop breasts or pubic hair, and in only the last six years, the percentage of girls under eight with swollen breasts or pubic hair has gone from 1 percent to 6.7 percent for white girls, and 27.2 percent for black girls.318
What are you going to do about this? Are you going to hope this problem somehow goes away? Will you hope someone magically solves it? Will you hope someone—anyone—will stop the chemical industry from killing us all?
Or will you do something about it?
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that it kills you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that once you’re dead they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, in fact more alive than ever before—but those in power no longer have a hold on you. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who depended on and believed in the mythologies propagated