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By Root 2321 0

state or corporate violence. I wanted to write that book because whenever I give talks in which I mention violence—suggesting that there are some things, including a living planet (or more basically clean water and clean air, by which I mean our very lives), that are worth fighting for, dying for, and killing for when other means of stopping the abuses have been exhausted, and that there exist those people (often buttressed or seemingly constrained by organizations) who will not listen to reason, and who can be stopped no way other than through meeting their violence with your own—the response is always the same. Mainstream environmentalists and peace and justice activists put up what I’ve taken to calling a “Gandhi shield.” Their voices get thin, and I can see them psychically shut down. Their faces turn to stone. Their bodies do not move, but the ghosts of their bodies form fingers into the shapes of crosses as they try to keep vampires and evil thoughts at bay, and they begin to chant “Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr.” in an effort to keep themselves pure. Grassroots environmentalists generally do the same, except after the talk some will sidle up to me, make sure no one is watching, and whisper in my ear, “Thank you for raising this issue.” Often, young anarchists get excited, because someone is articulating something they know in their bones but have not yet put words to, and because they’ve not yet bought into—and been consumed by—the culture. The most interesting response comes from some of the other people with whom I’ve spoken: survivors of domestic violence; radical environmentalists; Indians; many of the poor, especially people of color; family farmers; and prisoners (I used to teach creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermaximum security facility here in Crescent City). Their response is generally to nod slowly, look me hard in the eye, then say, “Tell me something I don’t already know.” Some will say, “What are you waiting for, bro? Let’s go.”

A major reason for the difference in response, I realized a long time ago, was that for these latter groups violence is not a theoretical question to be explored abstractly, philosophically, or spiritually,97 as it can often be for more mainstream activists, for those who may not have experienced violence in their own bodies, and who can then be more distant, even—and I’ve seen this a lot—acting as if these were political or philosophical games instead of matters of life and death. The direct experience of violence, on the other hand, often brings these questions closer to the people involved, so the people are not facing the questions as “activists” or “feminists” or “farmers” or “prisoners,” but rather as human beings—animals—struggling to survive. Having felt your father’s weight upon you in your bed; having stood in clearcut-and-herbicided moonscape after moonscape, tears streaming down your face; having had your children taken from you, land stolen that belonged to your ancestors since the land was formed, and your way of life destroyed; having sat at a kitchen table, foreclosure notice in front of you for land your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents worked, shotgun across your knees as you try to decide whether or not to put the barrel in your mouth; feeling the sting of a guard’s baton or the jolt of a stun gun (“I was tired,” one of my students wrote of being tasered, “I was 50,000 volts of tired”)—to suffer this sort of violence directly in your body—is often to undergo some sort of deeply physical transformation. It is often to perceive and be in the world differently.

Not always. We can all list political prisoners who have been tortured, nuns who have been raped, who have emerged from these horrors uttering forgiveness for their tormentors. But this is not, for the most part, the experience of the people I have met—(funny, isn’t it, how the ones who forgive are the ones whose stories we’re most likely to hear: could there possibly be political reasons for this? Remember, all