--I wrote the following in New Orleans, surrounded by what I saw, and still see, as a general apathy of 'the general public' towards the destruction of people, peoples and the environment. The numbness and motivation towards all three I feel are entwined and inseparable. The opening quote is meant not as a means of identifying with the deity, but rather to acknowledge that if there are limits that exist within the human consciousness and ability to discern what would truly be healthy & sustainable, for an individual, for a culture or for a species, that this limit could, in this instance, very well be termed God.
Corpses and Corpses
"And if despite this you do not heed Me and you come in encounter
against Me, I will come against you in wrathful encounter and I on My
part will chastise you sevenfold for your offenses. And you shall eat
the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters you shall eat.
And I will destroy your cult-places and cut off your incense stands,
and I will put your corpses on top of the corpses of your fetishes and
I will loathe you."
~Leviticus 26:26
How else do clocks keep time these days?
A shade of obsidian dropped over black silk,
with a car and a half for every soul here
the stratosphere is asking, "Why do you hate me?"
The icebergs are asking, "What wrong did we do?"
And we, the full time citizenry,
hop planes to discover the new inside us,
and back-up files to a second drive.
The math has been worked out
and grass will outlive us.
Meanwhile the dams provide the water to keep
the lights in casinos running and the rice villagers
underwater.
Our breath clogged from junk
still has a little room to breathe.
Six of the morning skies will still bless us,
after that, the seventh will loathe us.
A sky not sky emptying its contempt on us.
A desert growing larger each afternoon.
A swamp that shone like four beads of sweat
on Brahma's brow, dumping its millennial silt into the sea.
Are not half the world's things enough?
The children playing in the sand
are playing with guns and people's heads.
The elders spoon another tin
of cat food to get them to their next fix.
The derelict who speaks to himself,
had no choice
and has none now.
The smart sit unsurprised
and wrap themselves in kimonos and red wine.
We only see our reflection
as it bounces back towards us,
imagination travels sideways
wearing a green coat
only the quiet can hear.
To get the texture of it, hold soil in your hand
as you move a plant to a larger pot.
Rinse basmati with your fingers
and watch the starch cloud
swirl down the sink.
To gaze into the cells of prisons
is to be reminded of the darkness of humans,
like a tour of Auschwitz that never ends
and never ends.
A sheet over a detainee's head,
is an inescapable ten pound halo
screwed into each of our skulls.
We never ask if we can lessen
the load of our fellow travelers.
Only rarely
our hands outward to catch a fellow citizen.
One day I went with Atilio to the scrap yard
to add piles to the pile for beer.
What I saw there shook something loose.
A hundred foot high pile of ready-to-be-shredded
human dreams. Machines doing the slaving,
and four people saying we weren't adding junk
to the junk correctly. This is not metaphor.
This is watching money chew through bone.
This is watching machines drink pints of blood.
The bit that was left over from that scrap run,
enough to pan into six flakes for booze,
knowing the heavens over our head ready
and the storm just off the coast.
A little smile, a little music, while the fire
eats human limbs two handed.
An embrace we hold against the rising waters.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Derrick Jensen - from The Culture of Make Believe (not for the faint of heart)
It really isn't possible to talk about hate without talking about children as objects of hatred. I know that age isn't a protected class under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, but bear with me.
Each year an estimated 20,000 Mexican children disappear, many for use as mules, to transport drugs inside their bodies, others taken for the harvest of their organs, to be transplanted into children in the United States. This is according to a study performed by the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico and presented at a conference on "International Traffic in Children."
Worldwide, entire economies have been founded specifically on the sexual trade in children. One hundred to eight hundred thousand Thai girls and boys work as prostitutes (A brochure distributed in England advertising a Thai resort reads, "If you can suck it, use it, eat it, feel it, taste it, abuse it or see it, then it's available in this resort that truly never sleeps"). Nearly all of them are enslaved or indentured. A good portion have received death sentences from HIV. There are 1.5 to 2 million child prostitutes in India (those in Bombay, for example, are often held in cages; fifty cents buys half an hour of of sex with a twelve-year-old.) Five hundred thousand child prostitutes work in Brazil (a child of thirty-five pounds is considered a prime size in many mining towns). There are 200,000 child prostitutes in or from Nepal (most of these girls are kidnapped, sold for between forty and a thousand dollars, "broken in" through a process of rapes and beatings, and then rented out up to thirty-five times a night for one to two dollars per man). Between 100,000 and 300,000 children work the sex trade in the United States (one study of U.S. survivors of prostitution found that 78 percent were victims of rape by pimps and buyers an average of forty-nine times per year; 84 percent were the victims of aggravated assault; 49 percent had been kidnapped and transported across state lines; 53 percent were victims of sexual abuse and torture; and 27 percent had been mutilated). On average, a child prostitute serves more than 2,000 men per year. At least a million new girls per year are forced into prostitution.
Kids are not, of course, injured only through sexual exploitation. A half-million children die every year from starvation or other direct results of so-called debt payment from Third World countries--from the colonies--to those countries which lend them money while holding their resources and infrastructures as collateral--colonialism in the twenty-first century--and eleven million children die annually from easily treatable diseases. This latter has been called by the World Health Organization director-general 'a silent genocide.'
This is not counting the children who are simply beaten. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 1993, 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured. That's just in the United States.
So here's the question: Do all these numbers--or, more precisely, the reality behind these numbers--imply that we hate children? Perhaps the answer would be more evident if we simply invert the question: "Do we value children?"
The answer, of course, is yes. One to two dollars per fuck, unless we happen to be in the Philippines, in which case it will cost us six dollars to have sex with a six-year-old.
So let me put the question another way: Was slavery in the United States based on hatred of the Africans, or was it based on economics? Is hate even the right word?
The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred, felt long enough and deeply enough, no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are. Rape is not a hate crime because our hatred of women is transparent. Child prostitution is not a hate crime for the same reason that beating a child is not a hate crime, because our hatred of children is transparent. The economic murder of children (or creating the economic conditions for their slavery as prostitutes) is not a hate crime because we've held this hatred long enough to enshrine it into our macroeconomic policies.
If we did not hate children, we would not cause or even allow them to be destroyed by any of these means. And if we do not love even our children, what, precisely, can we truly say we love?
Each year an estimated 20,000 Mexican children disappear, many for use as mules, to transport drugs inside their bodies, others taken for the harvest of their organs, to be transplanted into children in the United States. This is according to a study performed by the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico and presented at a conference on "International Traffic in Children."
Worldwide, entire economies have been founded specifically on the sexual trade in children. One hundred to eight hundred thousand Thai girls and boys work as prostitutes (A brochure distributed in England advertising a Thai resort reads, "If you can suck it, use it, eat it, feel it, taste it, abuse it or see it, then it's available in this resort that truly never sleeps"). Nearly all of them are enslaved or indentured. A good portion have received death sentences from HIV. There are 1.5 to 2 million child prostitutes in India (those in Bombay, for example, are often held in cages; fifty cents buys half an hour of of sex with a twelve-year-old.) Five hundred thousand child prostitutes work in Brazil (a child of thirty-five pounds is considered a prime size in many mining towns). There are 200,000 child prostitutes in or from Nepal (most of these girls are kidnapped, sold for between forty and a thousand dollars, "broken in" through a process of rapes and beatings, and then rented out up to thirty-five times a night for one to two dollars per man). Between 100,000 and 300,000 children work the sex trade in the United States (one study of U.S. survivors of prostitution found that 78 percent were victims of rape by pimps and buyers an average of forty-nine times per year; 84 percent were the victims of aggravated assault; 49 percent had been kidnapped and transported across state lines; 53 percent were victims of sexual abuse and torture; and 27 percent had been mutilated). On average, a child prostitute serves more than 2,000 men per year. At least a million new girls per year are forced into prostitution.
Kids are not, of course, injured only through sexual exploitation. A half-million children die every year from starvation or other direct results of so-called debt payment from Third World countries--from the colonies--to those countries which lend them money while holding their resources and infrastructures as collateral--colonialism in the twenty-first century--and eleven million children die annually from easily treatable diseases. This latter has been called by the World Health Organization director-general 'a silent genocide.'
This is not counting the children who are simply beaten. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in 1993, 614,000 American children were physically abused, 300,000 were sexually abused, 532,000 were emotionally abused, 507,000 were physically neglected, and 585,000 were emotionally neglected. 565,000 of these children were killed or seriously injured. That's just in the United States.
So here's the question: Do all these numbers--or, more precisely, the reality behind these numbers--imply that we hate children? Perhaps the answer would be more evident if we simply invert the question: "Do we value children?"
The answer, of course, is yes. One to two dollars per fuck, unless we happen to be in the Philippines, in which case it will cost us six dollars to have sex with a six-year-old.
So let me put the question another way: Was slavery in the United States based on hatred of the Africans, or was it based on economics? Is hate even the right word?
The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred, felt long enough and deeply enough, no longer feels like hatred. It feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are. Rape is not a hate crime because our hatred of women is transparent. Child prostitution is not a hate crime for the same reason that beating a child is not a hate crime, because our hatred of children is transparent. The economic murder of children (or creating the economic conditions for their slavery as prostitutes) is not a hate crime because we've held this hatred long enough to enshrine it into our macroeconomic policies.
If we did not hate children, we would not cause or even allow them to be destroyed by any of these means. And if we do not love even our children, what, precisely, can we truly say we love?
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