Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [47]
She wrote me briefly when she returned, and then again a couple of months ago. She seemed to be doing well.
And then yesterday I received the letter. Evidently other people got the letter, too. It began, “Dear Friend, By the time you read this I will have done something that will come as no surprise to many of you. I will have committed suicide.” The letter went on to describe her attempts to overcome her pain, and ended with her arrangements for what should come after her death. She expressed regret that the law would not allow her to become food for wild animals.
After I got over my shock and had begun to move through my sorrow over the death of a good person I did not really know, I began to feel a stirring that within a few hours became the understanding that people usually don’t change. She may have thought she changed when she read my work, but she didn’t. She continued to daily ask the question of whether she should live or die until finally the answer came up die.
I know that I, too, carry scars both physical and emotional from my childhood that will never be healed. I know also that I will ask the same questions when I am old as when I was young. And I have to ask (the genesis of my question in no way negating its current relevance or importance): how much did my early experience of my father’s violence lead me to ask the question I’m asking now, about when is counterviolence an appropriate response to the violence of a dominator?120 Similarly, my mother is the same person she was twenty years ago, only wiser, and more tired. Most of my students at the prison love drugs—or at this point love writing about them—as much as they ever did. Often I only have to mention blunt, dub, heroin, crack, crank, and they’ll reminisce and laugh as those possessed. And even though they hate being imprisoned with an intensity I’ve rarely seen matched, and even though in many cases it was drugs that got them there, when I ask if they will use again when they get out (or for the lifers, would and if), most say yes. Statistics on addicts remaining sober (much less free of craving) are fairly dismal, and run from a low of ten to a high of 40 percent, with one writer commenting, “Chronic relapse is part of the etiology of addiction.”121
But of course I’m overstating when I say people don’t change. They do. I did. I could have turned out like my father. I could have remained a scientist. I could have—god help me—remained a Republican, as I was in my teens, or just as bad, a Democrat, as I was in my early twenties. People do change. But change takes hard work, luck, and some treasured reward on the other side; even when these are all present, it still doesn’t happen often. And that’s only on the scale of one person, with only one lifetime of momentum built into that trajectory. How much more difficult is it to expect change when we have six thousand years of history, as well as space heaters, major league baseball, tomatoes in January, strawberry cheesecake, and the capacity at any time to bid on 1,527,463 products (“most with ‘NO RESERVE PRICE’”) at ubid.com? And how much more difficult than that when those in power have prisons, guns, and sophisticated surveillance technologies at their disposal? And how much more difficult than that when those in power have television, newspapers, and compulsory schooling to promulgate their perspective? And how much more difficult than that when we promulgate it ourselves?
Several years ago the environmentalist and physician