Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [193]
A series of dreams. In the first, I’m in a canyon. Like the Grand Canyon, it’s huge. Also like the Grand Canyon, it’s on the Colorado River. But it’s near the ocean. I can hear the waves. Like the Colorado, the river no longer reaches the sea, but dies in sand and dirt, its water—its blood—sucked away by cities, by the civilized, held back by dams no one in this dream dreams of removing. In this dream, hydrologists and geologists and environmentalists and all sorts of other -ists dig little trenches in the sand where they place little fishes one by one in the hopes that water will magically rise up from the soil to keep the fishes alive. The ocean roars in the distance, the fish flop and die on the dry and sandy soil, the -ists stroke their chins in consternation, standing in the shadow of the dams, and do what pathetically little is available to them to save the river that they themselves are helping to kill by their stupidity and blindness.
This is what we do.
Later that night, I dreamt I was fighting a lich: a user of magic who had been not living, not dead for several thousand years. In this dream I had magic, too, but of a different sort, and each time he tried to freeze me in place, or suck away my life—as he had done to so many others, and as he must do if he is to continue to not-live, not-die—I struck him back twice as hard as he tried to strike me. He began to fear me, and then he began to weaken. Soon it became clear he was going to die. He kept fighting—because that was what he had done for so long—but suddenly I understood that not only was it my task to not let him kill me, and not only was it my task to kill him, but even more it was my task to release him from his undead state, to grant him the release that all undead351 secretly (even to themselves) desire. It was my task to teach him a lesson known to every tadpole, every raindrop, every sea anemone, every mountain, every elephant, every uncivilized human being: how to die. It was my task to finally and completely kill him.
This is what we must do.
But the dreams did not end there. Still later in the night, I was given a box of puppies, which I carried through a city. Although all of the puppies were from the same litter, many were tiny, smaller than the smallest runts I’ve ever seen. I had to hurry to return them to their mother. I searched and searched for a way out of the city, and at last reached a forest. There, their mother waited for them. I gave her back her children. Some, I knew, would live. And I knew that some would die.
This, I knew in the dream, is true as well for all of us—human and nonhuman alike—who are boxed up and separated from our source of sustenance, who are being killed by the fumes and emptiness of everything our cities represent and are. Some will live, and some will die. And I knew in the dream also that this is just as true for those of us who fight the system, those of us who fight the lich, those of us who do not merely dig tiny trenches in the barren sand below the big dams that need to be taken down: some of us will live and some of us will die.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
Every individual who wants to save his humanity—and, indeed his skin—had better begin thinking dangerous thoughts about sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all men [and women] everywhere. The mental attitude known as “negativism” is a good start.
Dwight MacDonald352
Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience.
U.S. et al v. Goering et al353
Anyone with knowledge of illegal activity and an opportunity to do something about it is a potential criminal under international law unless the person takes affirmative measures to prevent the commission of crimes.