Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [30]
Here’s another question that interests me even more: What is the premise (and purpose) of the silence surrounding victims of our way of life? That answer is clear as well, although we do not talk or even think about it.
Of course.
Imagine how our discourse and actions would be different if people daily detailed for us the lives—the individuality, the small and large joys and fears and sorrows—of those whom this culture enslaves or kills. Imagine if we gave these victims that honor, that attention. Imagine if everyday newspapers carried an account of each child who starves to death because cities take the resources on which the child’s traditional community has forever depended. She never ran, the article might read, because she never had the energy, but she loved to be tickled, and loved to watch her mother, no matter what her mother did. When her mother carried her in a sling on her back, her large eyes took in every detail of her surroundings. She loved to smile at her neighbors, and smile also at little birds that landed on the ground near her mother’s feet. Imagine if we considered her life as valuable as that of the “efficient executive,” and if we considered violence against her to be as heinous as we consider violence against him.
Imagine, too, if our discourse included accounts of those nonhumans whose lives this culture makes unspeakably miserable: the billions of creatures bred for torture in feedlot, factory farm, or laboratory; the wild creatures worth money, who are pursued and destroyed no matter where they hide; the wild creatures unvalued by the economic system, who are eliminated because they are in the way of production. Imagine if we spoke of the threespine stickleback, the Miami blue butterfly, white abalone, spectacled eider, southwestern willow flycatcher, Holmgren’s milkvetch, Pacific pocket mouse, individually and collectively. Imagine, finally, if we considered their lives as valuable as our own, and their contribution to the world and to our neighborhoods to be as valuable as that of a stockbroker—or even moreso—even if the stockbroker does drive a Porsche, flip us the bird, and take off in the wind.
The fourth premise of this book is that civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur it is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
This is true when we talk about the acceptability—the expectedness, normality, necessity, even desirability (only when victims force their hand, of course)—of the U.S. military and its proxies killing civilians the world over and the unthinkability of counterattacks in kind. It is true when we talk about the acceptability of routine police violence against civilians and the fetishization of police officers killed on the job (“All gave some, some gave all,” read the bumper stickers, but no one ever mentions, at the huge police funerals or elsewhere, that garbage collection is far more dangerous—with a far higher mortality rate—than police work; and don’t hold your breath waiting for the next Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise action flick about courageous garbage collectors putting their lives on the line to clean up the mean streets of New York or L.A.). This is true when we talk about humans extirpating sharks and other species almost unnoticed while trumpeting the rare cases when sharks or others bite humans (usually when the humans have already either destroyed the creature’s home, backed it into a corner, and/or physically tormented it): despite