I didn't vote.
I have every right to complain.

After all, my hope isn't to try to put a better person in charge of the system. My hope is to totally destroy the system because it's destroying everything I hold dear, and has proven through the centuries to do nothing but, no matter who's in charge of it. I'm told that I have no right to complain if I don't go, don't stand in line, don't pull one of the two levers that perpetuates the illusion of choice. Well... where's the choice to not participate in this horrible system? Which lever gives me that? No, not just me leaving the system, but the system no longer owning and destroying everything all around me, so that if I do leave the system, I still have water to drink, air to breathe, trees and food and the ability and right to live without having to have someone's permission? There are no such levers. Therefore, there's nobody for me to vote for. Therefore, I don't vote, AND I've every right to complain. And my complaint is, there's nothing but an illusion of choice, it'll all get taken away from us no matter WHO is voted in, or how much they preach about supposed change, and nobody cares. The system itself needs to die before we all do. I'm gonna turn the tables on you...

If you are not willing to revolt and overthrow that which is killing our freedom and our planet, you have no right to complain

(See last post, after all.) I'll bet that'll piss off a lot of people. I expect some more unfriendings. But well, what do ya think I feel like when I keep getting told I don't have a right to complain when I don't pull a lever for either asshole who doesn't care? Not voting IS the only way for me to voice myself.

The question is... do you?
Or do you just fall for the illusion of choice?

◄   █   ►

Thefollowing text comes from
A Language Older Than Words
written by Derrick Jensen
[As always, my own thoughts are in bold and in brackets]

Only recently... have I come to understand why the process of schooling takes so long. Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years. After you learn fractions and negative numbers in first or second grade, what new principles are taught in math until algebra in junior high? It's the same with science, art, history, reading, certainly writing. Nearly everything I learned those years—and this was true of my friends as well—was gleaned through books and conversations outside class. It's true to the point of cliché that most of the "crap" we learn in high school, as Simon and Garfunkle put it, is a bland stew of names, dates, and platitudes to be stored up the night before each test, then forgotten the moment the test is handed in.
    During high school, I believed the primary purpose of school was to break children of the habit of daydreaming. If you force them to sit still long enough, eventually they tire even of sinking turn-around fadeaways at the buzzer to win NBA championships. Having sat in the back of the class lining rockets over the left field fence for the better part of thirteen years, I was ready to move on.
    I've since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure. Less time wouldn't do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college. For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.
    I have nothing against education; it's just that education—from the Greek root educere, meaning to lead forth or draw out, and originally a midwife's term meaning to be present at the birth of—is not the primary function of schooling. [There are multitudes of present-day schoolteachers standing up and acknowledging this fact, by the way.] I'm not saying by all this that Mrs. Calloway, my first-grade teacher, was trying to murder the souls of her tiny charges, any more than I've been trying to say that individual scientists are necessarily hell-bent on destroying the planet or that individual Christians necessarily hate women and hate their bodies. [Thank you, precisely right... we inherited this nonsense, and it's never been an insane conspiracy, but it IS the insane way we live and fail to question.] The problem is much worse than that, it is not merely personal nor even institutional (although the institutions we've created do mirror the destructiveness of our culture). It is implicit in the processes, and therefore virtually transparent.
    Take the notion of assigning grades in school. Like the wages for which people later slave— once they've entered "the real world" [a favorite phrase of mine, for when I talk about this, some butthole imminently says "welcome to the real world", as though I'm stupid enough to just be waking up to this from a Paris Hilton fantasy of a world or something... when in reality, I'm merely mentioning this is no more the "only" way, nor the "real" way to live, and that it is a recent invention that too many insist IS the only way... PS: I usually get told this by people who insist that I need to learn to "think for myself", which proves to me that they wouldn't know someone who "thinks for himself" if he crawled up their ass, grew titanium spikes, and started to spin]—the primary function of grades is to offer an external reinforcement to coerce people to perform tasks they'd rather not do. Did anyone grade you when you learned how to fish? What grades did you get for pretending, shooting hoops, playing pinball, reading good books, kissing ("I'm sorry, dear, but you receive a C—"), riding horses, swimming in the ocean, having intense conversations with close friends? On the other hand, how often have you returned, simply for the joy of it, to not only peruse your high school history textbook [okay, guilty, and some of you are geeks as well, but the point is made] but to memorize names and dates, and, once again for the joy of it, to have a teacher mark, in bright red, your answers as incorrect?
    Underlying tests as given in schools are the presumptions not only that correct answers to specific questions exist, but that those answers are known to authority figures and can be found in books. [Seriously... read that statement again and really absorb it. I get sick as shit of being told everything I see, feel, and know, is wrong because some fucking book or "expert" has some stats to back it up. And I can't think for myself?] Tests also generally discourage communal problem solving. [Although that's surely not dead in this culture or anything. Sarcasm? Me? No!!!!] Equally important is the presumption that a primary purpose of school is to deliver information to students. Never asked is the question of how this information makes us better people, or better kissers, for that matter. [Maybe better suckers, but...] Systematically—inherent in the process—direct personal experience is subsumed to external authority, and at every turn creativity, critical thought, and the questioning of fundamental assumptions (such as, for example, the role of schooling on one's socialization) are discouraged...
    Grades, as is true once again for wages in later life, are an implicit acknowledgment that the process of schooling is insufficiently rewarding on its own grounds for people to participate of their own volition. If I go fishing, the time on the water—listening to frogs, smelling the rich black scent of decaying cattails, holding long conversations with my fishing partner, watching osprey dive to emerge holding wriggling trout [an amazing feat to behold, and too many children have no idea what even an osprey is, nor that birds of prey have such fantastic abilities]—serves me well enough to make me want to return. And even if I have a bad day fishing, which, as the bumper sticker proclaims, is supposed to be "better than a good day at work," [and this is probably a bad time for me to admit I hate fishing] I still receive the reward of dinner. The process and product are their own primary rewards. I fish; I catch fish; I eat fish. [I love beef so much, and if I'm not mistaken, the hunting of it is quite a bit easier... I am, of course, joking.] I enjoy getting better at fishing. I enjoy eating fish. [I love cooking salmon with marmalade and basil, with a side of brussel sprouts steamed with butter. I wish you could still walk to any river and catch one with nothing more than a bucket, but dams have made that next to impossible. Salmon is one of those delicacies so delicious that you just have to wonder why we as a people could be so fucking careless as to eradicate them just to have extra water for our lawns. And by the way, lawns are boring. Grass is annoying and I'm allergic anyway. I love the look of a wild-grown field so much more, and you don't have to mow the motherfucker or weed it or anything. What the fuck is wrong with people anyway?!?!?] No grades nor dollars are required to convince me to do it. Only when essential rewards disappear does the need for grades and dollars arise.
    It could be argued that I'm missing the point, that the product of the years of homework and papers and tests are not the physical artifacts, nor the grades, nor the bits of information, but instead the graduates themselves. [Who graduate to become dumbass consumer slaves who drive their SUVs (only one person to a vehicle) with a Starbuck's in one hand and a cell phone in the other... some value!] But that's my point exactly, and we must ask ourselves what sort of product is that, from what sort of process. [Note... "product".]
    A primary purpose of school—and this is true for our culture's science and religion as well —is to lead us away from our own experience. The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings—as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture—but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time. This lesson is crucial to individual economic success ("I love art," my students would say, "but I've got to make a living"), to the perpetuation of our economic system (What if all those who hated their jobs quit?), and it is crucial, as should be clear by now, to the rationale that causes all mass atrocities.
    Through the process of schooling, each fresh child is attenuated, muted, molded, made—like aluminum—malleable yet durable, and so prepared to compete in society, and ultimately to lead this society where it so obviously is headed. Schooling as it presently exists, like science before it and religion before that, is necessary to the continuation of our culture and to the spawning of a new species of human, ever more submissive to authority, ever more pliant, prepared, by thirteen years of sitting and receiving, sitting and regurgitating, sitting and waiting for the end, prepared for the rest of their lives to toil, to propagate, to never make waves [or "cop-outs", to never be a "miscreant", let's just say...], and to live each day with never an original thought nor even a shred of hope.

In Letters From an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crévecoeur noted: "There must be in the Indians' social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans."
    Benjamin Franklin was even more to the point: "No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies." It was commonly noted that at prisoner exchanges, Indians ran joyously to their relatives while white captives had to be bound hand and foot to not run back to their captors. [But there I go with that "noble savage" claptrap again, eh? Because remember, you can't say anything nice about their culture without being a wannabe Indian, like I've already been accused.]
    It is small wonder, then, that from the beginning, whenever we have encountered an indigenous culture, we have had the Lord our God—replaced now by economic exigency—tell us that "thou shalt smite them; and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them." [I'd look up that verse, but I don't really care where it is. I already know that book to be full of that kind of crap so much that I don't need further proof of it.] What seems at first aggression is in fact self-preservation, a practical staunching of what would otherwise be an unmanageable and embarrassing flow of desertions.
    The same self-preservation motivated my father's actions when I was a child. [Through much of this book, he compares our culture's strange methods to his highly abusive father's ways... his father beat and raped much of his family repeatedly. But, well... according to one of the idiots from the atheist group who noted I'd mention Jensen's name, Jensen is supposed to just be a "whiny douchebag", which should remind us all never to talk about the abuse of women and children in this culture, lest we should be called the same.] To preserve the person that he had become, he had to smite and utterly destroy all who reminded him of what could have been, and of the person he once was, far beyond conscious memory, before his parents, too, out of self-preservation destroyed him. So he lashed out with fist, foot, voice, penis, all so he could forget, all so we could never know, ourselves, that alternatives to fear existed. Had he been able to destroy the stars to so destroy me, he would have done it. [But of course, don't whine about this kind of upbringing, right?] Had he been able to destroy the stars, as even now we are destroying the seas and forests and grasslands and deserts, he would have succeeded, I am sure, in destroying me. [Our destruction of buffalo and of salmon is what destroyed the cultures of American Indian nations first and foremost. I'm still convinced much of what passes as "kosher" eating was the foods that were marketable, to prevent people from daring to become independent from the market and the culture's domination by eating whatever you could catch freely. This IS precisely what our culture does.]
    In the eighteenth century, de Crévecoeur wrote, "As long as we keep ourselves busy tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild." Though the wild outside diminishes each day, as do intact cultural alternatives, the fear of these alternatives remains. The fear shall remain so long as we live the way we do, and so long as there are alternatives we must avoid. The alternatives shall remain so long as there is life. We should not be surprised, then, that our culture as a whole must destroy all life and that we as individuals must not dwell upon the horrors we visit not only upon others but upon ourselves, that we dwell instead upon the daily earning of our bread, and beyond that pile upon ourselves project after project to keep ourselves always occupied, [something I keep meaning to post about, and a master pet peave of mine] always unconscious of the fact that we do not have to live this way, always blindered to alternatives. For if we looked we might see, if we saw we might act, and if we acted we might take responsibility for our own lives. If we did that, what then?

[I can remember a thousand times being told I am a man without conviction, simply because I did not have money, a job, or that I had "excuses" for why I didn't. It couldn't even possibly enter the minds of such people that these ARE my convictions, and that I live by them a thousand times better than they do the convictions they espouse... these assclowns preached against sexual immorality but had to confess lusts to me and other "brothers" so often it was frightening. Okay, amusing. Sometimes even arousing. Sometimes I wanted them to demonstrate rather than describe, but... well...]

One method Nazis used to control Jews was to present them a series of meaningless choices. Red inquiry papers were issued to one group, while another received blue. Which will permit my family to survive another selection? Are identity papers with or without photographs safer? Should I declare myself a shoemaker or clothier? [See The Illusion of Choice sometime, if this puzzles you how it relates to today... especially those of you stupid enough to think that all will be better if we just get a Democrat in office again.] When the line splits, do I step to the left or the right? In making these choices victims felt the illusion of control over their destinies, and often failed to reject the entire system. Resistance to exploitation was diminished.
    [Really, reeeeeeeeally absorb that last two sentences... failed to reject the entire system. Does anybody really have the guts (dare I call it conviction) to reject the entire system? Or just flip one of two switches and proudly declared you voted? Or choose not to lust rather than to lust and proudly declare you acted holy? Or choose "D: None of the above" and get an A on the paper, and proudly say you did well in school, but not realize it meant you think as they tell you to now? And it never crosses our minds... but when it does cross someone's, they're dubbed "miscreants" and "whiny douchebags" and a whole slew of lovely names.]
    Not only Jews have faced false choices... [He rehashes things from stories of his family's personal abuse here... they won't make sense, but suffice it to say, no matter their choices, their father still abused them with "good reason".]
    Last fall I attended a debate, of sorts, between two people running to be Manager of the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Although one was female and the other male, they were, as is so often true of political opponents, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable. Talking of the public forests, the first spoke not of salmon, lynx, or grizzly, but of "managing an asset portfolio." The second never mentioned the words "forest" or "wildlife," and in fact mentioned no creatures save cows. [This is where I stand guilty, of course.] Because so much money is involved in the "managing of this public resource," he said, these forests should be considered "a big business to be run by a CEO."
    That evening—as the moderator, a representative of the region's corporate newspaper, asked his final question, "Do environmental regulations work, or do they go too far?"—I thought of the words of Meir Berliner, who died fighting the SS at Treblinka, "When the oppressors give me two choices, I always take the third." I though also—as I reflected on meaningless talk of shuffling numbers on abstract ledgers—of the real-world effects of these people's decisions. I wondered, if wolves, elk, owls, or salamanders could right now take on human form and speak through me or anyone else here, what would they say? [And would people tune them out if their voices aren't "nice" and "positive", and instead, for some silly reason, angry? You know, like I get when I attempt to speak for them.] If the children who will inherit the consequences of our actions were here tonight... how would they respond?
    When the moderator opened the evening to the public, I raised my hand. I said, "A comment, then a question. The comment: I have to say that if bobcats, wolves, trees, and salmon could vote, they wouldn't vote for either one of you." Everyone gasped, as though I had pulled a gun. "Now a question: Pretend we're children two generations hence, and defend your actions to us. Tell us why we shouldn't hate you for destroying our world." Another gasp, as though I had fired it through their hearts. A friend of mine, sitting next to me, who is a longtime environmentalist, slid slightly away from me on the metal chair beneath him. [Now that's a douchebag. Stand up for what you believe, you coward!]
    Notwithstanding the knowledge that every creature—except for the more wounded among us— tries to move in the direction of life; and not withstanding the white-haired and wizened woman who approached me—after the politicians addressed neither comment nor question—to thank me and say she wished she would have said the same; and notwithstanding the knowledge that there can be no more important comment to make nor question to ask, I felt intensely alone. I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong.

Somewhere along the line, my schooling fell short. Not only did it fail to permanently eradicate my perception of an animate world, it also left me ill-prepared for a life of gainful employment.
    Through college I worked as a physics assistant for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). I learned how to program computers, assist in experiments, and align lasers. I also learned that if you pour liquid nitrogen out of a thermos on a hot July afternoon, it evaporates before it hits your bare feet yet still feels deliciously cool. Most important, I learned that I would never again sell my time.
    I've never understood the stereotype of inefficient or lazy federal workers. [Wait till they tell you NEED a document to do something in your life, then you have to wait for it with your life on hold for months before they get around to handing it to you... then you'll understand. But...] The scientists with whom I worked were smart, resourceful, and dedicated. If one of my supervisors called in sick, I could usually count on him showing up later, unwilling to miss the day's experiment.
    Their love for their work struck me, because I sometimes called in sick when it was a nice day, rationalizing the lie by telling myself I was sick of work, which was true enough.
    For nearly as long as I can remember, I've had the habit of asking people if they like their jobs. Over the years, about 90 percent—with the exception of my bosses at NOAA—have said no. As I sat bored those days at my computer, I began to wonder what that percentage means, both socially and personally. I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doing things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing...

[I know what happens... we begin to lie to ourselves that such suffering is a "virtue" and begin to hate those without this "virtue" who don't suffer as we do. We begin to look our noses down at non-workers because, as workers, we're obviously better than we are. This act of elitism is never considered as horrible as racism, naturally, but in every sense, it is. And since I couldn't think like that, I found little satisfaction as a worker, little feeling of supposed satisfaction at a hard day's work done. I just felt sore and angry and baffled at why people put up with this shit. This is what the so-called "work ethic" really does... makes us feel even more justified at being a different kind of snobby asshole... yelling, "Get a job!" to those who, in fact, tried but cannot.]

...We never have enough time to catch up—I never knew what that meant, but it always felt as though I were running downhill, my body falling faster than my legs could carry me— enough time to try to understanding what we want to do with the so very few hours each of us are given.

...One of my classes took a field trip to a Hewlett-Packard plant, where hundreds of employees designed and assembled calculators and computers. The factory was a vision of hell —a clean, well-lit, unionized, well-paying, reasonably quiet, yet horribly repetitive hell- -as people, mainly women of color, soldered circuits on boards, or used huge magnifiers to inspect the work of others. I couldn't imagine anyone choosing to spend a life this way, and wondered what they ignored in order to maintain composure and even sanity amid the boredom. I assumed that a purpose of the trip was to convince us to finish our degrees, thus guaranteeing we would never enter this circle of hell except as overseers. For me it didn't quiet work that way, because the alternative seemed little better. Our guide was an engineer who didn't assemble but designed circuit boards, and I will never forget the pride with which he showed us his cubicle—perhaps eight feet by ten—and said, "After three years I've been given a window." The window was tall and narrow, and didn't open. The grass was green, the sky pale blue, the clouds white, the day warm.
    The next morning, class began at eight. The instructor was an ancient, foul-tempered moose of a man who made it his practice to ask questions seemingly out of the air, and then whirl to demand an answer from a student caught unawares. That morning I was his victim. He said, "So," followed by a long pause as he paced the front of the classroom, "what did you learn yesterday?" He trailed off, then twisted impossibly quickly for a man of his size, age, and health. He pointed and called my name.
    Because this was a required class, and because my grades weren't high enough to guarantee safe passage, and because I knew from experience that disagreement was not agreeable to him, under normal circumstances I would have simply brownnosed my way out of his spotlight. But I was, as always, slow in the morning, and I'd been caught off-guard, so I told the truth, "I learned I wouldn't want to work for Hewlett Packard."
    The class laughed. Dr. Kline didn't. He smiled absently, and entered into his lecture as though he hadn't heard me. I thought I was safe. Then he stopped mid-sentence, turned, pointed again, and said, "That's okay, Derrick. They wouldn't hire you anyway." I realized my error then, and realized it again when I received my next test back.

...I sat at the computer at work, debugging. I was bored. It was afternoon. I was twenty-two. It was June... Turning away from the computer I saw through my own narrow window (at least it opened) the green, the blue, the flashes [of lightning]. I looked to the clock, the screen, the window. An hour passed, then two. I looked again at the clock and saw it had been only twenty minutes. I willed the second-hand, the minute-hand, the hour-hand to move faster, to deliver me to five o'clock when I would be released as from my prison term. Then suddenly I stopped, struck by the absurdity of wishing away the only thing I've got. Eight hours, eighty years, it was all too similar. Would I wish away the years until the day of my retirement, until my time was once again my own? At work I tried to keep busy to make the hours pass quickly. It was no different when watching television, socializing, moving frenetically— there are so many ways to kill time.
    I remember staring at the computer screen—light green letters on dark—then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good.
    I quit work two weeks later—having sold another eighty of my hours—and knew I could never again work a regular job. [And what I want to know is, why are we giving our fingers away, when we should be giving the finger to our bosses and taking our lives back?]

...What if we stand the notion of ownership on its head? What if I do not own the barn, but instead it owns me, or better [and the third option], we own each other? What if I do not view it as my right to kill mice simply because I can, and because a piece of paper tells me I own their habitation? What if, because their habitation is near my own, I am responsible for their well-being? What if I take care of them and their community as the grandfather ponderosa outside this window takes care of me, and as before that the stars soothed me? This relationship of mutual care doesn't mean that none shall die, nor even that I won't kill anything, nor eventually be killed; it simply means we will treat each other with respect, and that neither will unnecessarily shit where the other bathes. The bees, too, stand in my purview, and so it becomes my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they can sustain their community. The same can be said for the communities of wild roses, native grasses, trees, frogs, mosquitoes, ants, flies, bluebirds, bumblebees, and magpies that, too, call this their home. We all share responsibility toward each other and toward the soil, which in turn shares responsibility to each of us. What if all of life is not what we've been taught, a "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" competition to see who may own or kill the others before the others can own or kill them? What if we don't need to live our whole lives alone? What if life is a web of immeasurably complex and respectful relationships? What if the purpose—even the evolutionary purpose—is for each of us to take responsibility for all those around us, to respect their own deepest needs, to esteem and be esteemed by them, to feed and feed off them, to be sustained by their bodies and eventually to sustain them with our own?

...It seems likely that no one living today will ever experience a fully natural interaction with either another human or nonhuman. All observations, including my own, are made as through a glass darkly, because we now live in a world of refugees.
    The Yanomame Indians are a violent and misogynistic group of people, but how much of that violence has developed in defensive response to marauding Europeans? We shall never know what they were like before, nor will we know anything about peaceful groups. After encountering the Arawaks, Christopher Columbus wrote: "They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrously timid... [T]hey are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one could believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them." The Arawaks were exterminated for their kindness.

[And let it be said, that as he began this section about the "fully natural interaction", Columbus was not forced to earn their respect. It was naturally simply to respect. We insist you are not respected until you've already proven to be the "only" type of person our culture does respect, which is a wage-earning, well-to-do hoop-jumper. Children have to earn their parents' love, and if you're to be given love and a loving partnership, you have to be all the things that, I'm sorry to say, have proven to be most detrimental in the courtship of love, and so obsessed with it that you have enough things and stuff to win the love and lust of another. My point here is made. This isn't natural, and I'm tired of relationships where lovers ignore each other, and are together for convenience, or seeing people who love each other dearly but cannot be together because of monetary and economical inconveniences. I'm fucking sick of it. Wasted time, wasted fingers, wasted love... when are we going to get sick of this?]

    These are some observations that are worth our consideration. We know that groups of Yanomame who were better hidden from European influence are less misogynistic and less violent than their troubled cousins. Our violence has reversed the rule of cooperative natural selection, such that those who fight possibly survive, and those who don't fight will most likely die. The inverse is true as well: those who survive learn how to fight, or more precisely, those who survive learn by painful experience to deafen themselves to their own suffering, and the suffering of others. The deafness facilitates the perpetration of extreme violence since extreme violence and survival are now associated. The violence leads only to further deafness, each furthering the other in a spiral of attenuated feelings until at long last we mimic "beast-machines"—horribly frightened, and not so very rational after all.
    I do not know what my brothers would have become without exposure to my father's violence. Nor do I know the same about my sisters or my mother. Nor also do I know what it would have been like to have a father whose parents had not transformed him through their own violence. With no notion of what a peaceful family or a peaceful culture or a peaceful culture [sic... good to know you can have this kind of typo and still be published... gives me more hope that I will be, really] might have to offer, I am not a refugee from my own childhood. The millions of rape victims around the world are refugees from a worldview that was not inevitable, but chosen. We all—human and nonhuman alike—are refugees from the war zone that is civilization.
    We would not expect studies made of Russians fleeing the advance of Nazi panzers in World War II, or later suffering under the eyes of einsatzgruppen, to adequately reflect ordinary—nonstressed—human behavior, so why do we assume that anthropological studies—by definition performed by members of the dominant culture or those at least partially assimilated, under rules devised by the dominant culture, for the benefit and perpetuation of that same culture—reveal any more about the ordinary—nonstressed—state of humans? The same can be asked about studies of nonhumans. What makes us think, as we systematically destroy their homes and exploit them, that they will act around us as they ordinarily do—perhaps fearlessly, perhaps cooperatively—or even that they are any more capable of acting as they would have before?
    What happens to those who are so stupid—or perhaps so principled—that they do not modify their behavior to protect themselves in this war zone? The dodos, a product of their benign environment, were fearless when they first encountered Europeans. We cured them of that fearlessness by destroying them, as we cured the Arawak people, the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew.
    The violence of civilization provide us with two options. We can distance ourselves from the world of experience, sense, and emotion, or we can die. I've tried the first, and I'm not ready for the second. We need a third option.

—————————————————————————-

"The world of the concentration camps . . . was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society into which we are plunged every day."

Eugéne Ionesco

Just moved back to Georgia. So happy to be back where I belong.

Haumikole!

Friends and Allies;

Thank you all for your expressions of encouragement, support and solidarity. At this time, we are putting together information for supporters of Lakota Freedom. In order to best serve our mutual needs, we'd like to provide the following information and make the following requests.
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4. Information about the possibilities of immigration and relocation to the Nation will be forthcoming. Keep checking the website for updates on the future of the Nation.

Due to the volume of incoming emails, it would be very helpful if you included the code INFORESPONSE in the subject of your responding emails to info@lakotafreedom.com.