ON MUMBAI, DELHI AND LATEHAR (2012-13): WHAT IS THE THRESHOLD ? 1. We live our lives, grateful that things aren’t worse than they are. But there has to be a threshold beyond which we can no longer ignore the destructiveness of our way of living. ‘What is that threshold ? One in two women raped ? Every woman raped ? 500 million children enslaved ? 750 million? A billion? All of them ? The disappearance of flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darkened the sky for days at a time? The death of salmon runs so thick that it was impossible to dip an oar without “striking a silvery back” ? The collapse of earthworm populations? This deal by which we adapt ourselves to the receiving, witnessing, and committing of violence by refusing to perceive its effects on ourselves and on others is ubiquitous. And it is a bad deal. As R. D. Laing has written about our culture, “The condItion of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.” The question still hangs heavy in the air: If our behavior is not making us happy, why do we act this way ?>> 2. ...Many of these cultures did not have rape, nor did they have child abuse.. >> It is perhaps significant that prior to contact with Western [replace here Western with Modern -- GL ] Civilization many of these cultures did not have rape, nor did they have child abuse (the Okanagans of what is now British Columbia, to provide just one example, had neither word nor concept in their language corresponding to the abuse of a child. They did have a word corresponding to the violation of a woman: literally translated it means “someone looked at me in a way I don’t like”). It is perhaps significant as well that these cultures did not drive the passenger pigeon to extinction, nor the salmon, the wood bison, the sea mink, the Labrador heathen, the Eskimo curlew, the Taipei tree frog. Would that we could say the same. It is perhaps significant that members of these cultures listen attentively (as though their lives depend on it, which of course they do) to what plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and stars have to say, and that these cultures have been able to do what we can only dream of, which is to live in dynamic equilibrium with the rest of the world. 3. If we are to survive, we must learn a new way to live, or relearn an old way. There have existed, and for the time being still exist, many cultures whose members refuse to cut the vocal cords of the planet, and refuse to enter into the deadening deal which we daily accept as part of living. from A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen (2004)
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 09:32:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015