Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [182]
Sure, we can let the potential response of these people be one more piece of information that helps to influence our choices, but we must always remember that we are only responsible for our own actions. Just as we are not responsible for the choices—retributive or otherwise—made by those in power as putative response to any action we may take, so, too, we are not responsible for the response or non-response of the mass of Americans (or Czechs, Liberians, or Indonesians, for that matter).
Here’s another way to put the seventeenth premise: The mass of civilized people will never be on our side.324 I’m not saying by this that we should give up on educating or informing people (I am, after all, a writer: educating and informing is what I do). I’m saying, first, that we need to try to be aware of where our identification lies—with whom or what we identify—and we need to ask ourselves: If what the mass of Americans want is in opposition to what your own particular landbase needs, which do you choose to support? If it comes down to stark choices—which of course it already does—on which side will you take your stand (recognizing also that refusing to choose is just another way of choosing the default)?325
Second, I’m saying that we need to be aware that we have a finite amount of time each day and a finite amount of time in our lives, so if we actually hope to accomplish something tangible we need to choose wisely how we spend that time. Some people may feel it’s the best use of their time to inch fence-sitters closer to falling to the side of the living, and by all means they should do that. I don’t think most fence-sitters are effectively reachable, and so I do not write for them. I write for people who already know how horrible civilization is, and who want to do something about it. I want to encourage them to be more radical, more militant, just as others have encouraged me.
Further, we need to recognize that educating people will only go so far toward saving salmon, sturgeon, marlins, prairie dogs, forests, rivers, glaciers, oceans, skies, the planet. At some point we have to actually do something.
The problem is not and has never been that the mass of people do not have enough information, such that if we just present them with enough facts they will strive for justice, for sanity, for what is best for their landbase. Think again about rape. Rape is not caused by a lack of information. Similarly, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that dams kill salmon, or that deforestation kills creatures who live in forests. Would it have merely required information to get the whites who slaughtered Indians (or who took their land after the soldiers had done the slaughtering) to stand with these Indians against members of their own culture? Would it require that today, as traditional indigenous people continue to be put in reserves, concentration camps, prisons, and graves, and as their land continues to be stolen? When cancer kills those we love—our grandparents, brothers, sisters, children, friends, lovers—when chemicals cause little girls to develop breasts and pubic hair, when pesticides make children stupid and sickly, the problem is not education. The problem has never been education. To believe that it is, is to buy into yet one more lie that keeps us from acting to protect ourselves.
Or maybe it’s not one more lie, but the same old lie, the same old faith-based excuse for inaction, except that this time instead of it being some mythical god or great mother who will save us if only we act in good enough faith—if only we are nice enough, kind enough, loving enough (using the culture’s self-serving and toothless definition of love) to our exploiters—it is some just-as-mythical mass of Americans who will somehow save the day if only—if only—we are innocuous enough to not frighten them off (and not coincidentally,