1942658087 by Magdalena Platzova

Author:Magdalena Platzova [Platzova, Magdalena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942658092
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2016-03-15T22:00:00+00:00

WHEN I GOT HOME, I didn’t feel like going to bed yet, so I turned on my computer to see what was new. Nothing had changed in the past few days. Protests against state budget cuts were still raging in Europe. People smashing shop windows and burning cars. Hundreds of gallons of oil gushing into the ocean from a broken pipe nobody knew how to fix. Thousands of people dying in a country hit by floods, but it was the third one this year already, so no one really cared. The Chinese had taken a crew of Vietnamese fishermen hostage, and the Japanese had taken a captain in the Chinese navy.

On the Web site of Democracy Now, I found an interview by Amy Goodman with Derrick Jensen, the environmental activist Ilana had been talking about earlier.

Jensen, who was born in 1960, says there’s no way to prevent the end of civilization.

No way of life based on exploitation can go on forever, he says. The end is coming soon and we need to prepare for it by actively dismantling civilization. First the cities. And the dams. People have to learn to cook over a fire again and gather edible plants, restore our direct relationship with what we consume.

There’s a lot of work ahead of us, for everyone. Let’s stop wasting time pretending things can go on the way they are. With fewer and fewer salmon returning to the rivers every year, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that eventually there won’t be any left.

The only sustainable way of living, says Jensen, was in the Stone Age, and there’s no doubt we’ll end up there again; it’s just a question of what will be left when we get there. How many animal and plant species will have to go extinct, how many poisons we’ll have to put into our systems.

We all have blood on our hands, he says.

He says he learned about violence and the dynamics of power from his father, who abused him.

It occured to me that the first generation of anarchists, the radical prophets of human freedom, were also raised by abusive fathers and teachers. Their rebellion against God and the state was the rebellion of sons and daughters against their fathers.

It must have been all the wine I drank. As I lay in bed, sinking into sleep, I suddenly felt dizzy. I saw myself from on high, just a tiny person stuck on the massive body of planet Earth, hurtling through the dark reaches of space at 67,000 miles per hour. As the ice and rubble whizzed past my ears, in my mind I hear the end of a poem Ilana recited to me once, back in the fall: “Do you hear the bullet flying over our heads? Do you hear the bullet waiting—for our kiss?”

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