Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [178]
I don’t particularly want to die. I love living, and I love my life. But I’ll tell you something that helped me lose at least some of the fear I have that those in power will kill me if I threaten their perceived entitlement to destroy the planet. I asked myself: What’s the worst they can do to me? Effectively, the worst they can do is kill me. Yes, they can torture me—as they do to so many—or they can put me in solitary confinement in a tiny box—as they also do to so many—but I would hope (there’s that word) that in those cases I’d be able to kill myself if necessary. Well, so far as I can figure, if they kill me, most probably one of three things will happen. One possibility is that when we die, it’s “boom, boom, out go the lights,” in which case I’ll just be dead, and I won’t know anything anyway. Another possibility is that after we die we go “somewhere else,” whatever that means, in which case I’ll just keep fighting them from there. And a third possibility is that after we die we get reincarnated. If that happens, I’ll follow the lead of the eighteen-year-old Indian Kartar Singh (Sardar Kartar Singh Saraba, or sometimes Shaheed Kartar Singh Saraba) who fought to drive the British from his home, and who in 1915 was betrayed and caught. When the magistrate overseeing the case was about to choose whether to hang him or imprison him for life, Kartar Singh stated: “I wish that I may be sentenced to death, and not life imprisonment, so that after re-birth, I may endeavour to get rid of the slavery imposed by the whites. If I am born as a female, I shall bear lion-hearted sons, and engage them in blowing to bits the British rulers.”320
The court decided he was too dangerous to be allowed to live.
I hope he came back to fight again.
The man from the EPA continued, “I’m glad you’re not a pacifist. I’m peaceloving myself, but have long studied martial arts. I don’t consider this a contradiction. Sometimes danger is a form of protection. There’s a reason that even peaceful wild things are born with thorns and claws. The real questions are: how and when you should ‘open the can of whoop ass’ (that’s redneck talk).
“I’m glad that you’re willing to eat meat yet you question how meat is produced. This is a very important distinction. I wrote a discharge permit for one of the largest slaughterhouses in the world. Five thousand cows per day, plus processing of meat from the equivalent of five thousand cows per day killed in off-site slaughterhouses. That’s a lot of slaughter. Pollution output like a big city. This is the most economically efficient production of meat the world has ever seen, but highly polluting and unconscionably cruel. I believe it hurts us as a people to allow this cruelty to animals, and it hurts our souls to pretend meat is raised in some peaceful rural barnyard.
“You mentioned that you thought that things might go with a Bang. Since 9/11, I have been working on security issues, vulnerability assessments, response plans, etc. I know a bit about these matters and agree that there is a very real possibility of use of “weapons of mass destruction” by the U.S. or others. My pet theory, however, is not a bang, but a whimper. As you said, the gasoline party is over. We’ve passed the halfway mark of mineable petroleum supply, and the last half will be harder to extract economically than the first half. (Old Jed won’t find more bubbling crude without high tech equipment and expensive extraction methods.)
“Meanwhile, world consumption is growing.
“As oil, water, and key minerals go into shorter supply, the slow squeeze will begin. Power structures, political and otherwise, need power to stay in power. It’s hard to run an Empire on an empty tank, and the political/economic powerhouses could find themselves coughing to a stop in some very bad neighborhoods. That is happening now.
“In the twilight of a civilization, the state of emergency or crisis can last a century. There will