June 16, 2002

On Killing

Why, on a vulnerable planet where nothing comes without its context

Where everything is connected and interdependent, do we, people, kill each other?

Not one by one, but wholesale, purposefully, ever more efficiently, often covertly

Vying to get a better deal for ourselves, those near us, and those who are like us

Hoping our own boat will be among those lifted by the purported rising tide

Never mind the dinghies and leaky wrecks left to sink amid the waves

The measure of a society is in the fate

Of its least, weakest, most disliked member

When our Christian God made the world, and then Adam and Eve to populate it

Did He intend to impart to us the message that neither nature nor we are divine

Only manufactures of the divine, and hence surely not as sacred?

To populate the world soon came to mean to dominate it, and now we are sovereign

We can marginalize Him, usurp His throne, for at our command is life on earth B

The birth, the death and the evolution of all species, including our own

Why does God give us babies that are less than perfect?

Surely an error, referred to our biotechnicians for rectification

Our science excludes, minimizes, ignores and shatters the web of life

We look at microbes under the microscope, take butterflies to the laboratory

Put lions in cages, dissect plants and animals in order to see how they function

We induce mutations, clone human embryos, insert genes without their modifiers

Turn plants into pesticides, create new fungi, enhance the virulence of pathogens

Develop bioregulators B all for our own purposes, as if we were dealing with machines

The Luddites were not against the development of machines

They were against machines used to dehumanize workers

We shun the unmeasurable, seeking only unalterable laws, whether in physics or economics

We reward greed, competition, selfishness, self-advancement at the expense of others

We see the world as merely the sum of its parts, assigning each its own commercial value

Our statistics have no language for human bonding, kindness, empathy, love, community

Perhaps we pull together only in war when we are threatened by our latest enemy

And send our young ones to kill and be killed, so that we can maintain our way of life

Look at the stars, says the mother to her six-year old, in the year 2025

No, not that one B that is a nuclear space station circling the earth to protect us

I know exploitation. My paternal grandfather used Caribbean slaves to make his fortune

His father was a General when the Gatling gun made subduing natives a painless adventure

My maternal step-grandfather used African, AGold Coast@ slaves to accumulate his capital

Never permitting his wife possession of company shares, reserving these for his family only

My maternal great-grandfather used Russian cheap, docile and flexible workers for his business

Feeling most cheated when they confiscated his gambled money during their Revolution in 1917

Are we not re-staging in our world the hierarchical image of our youth

Parent/child becoming powerful/weak, wealthy/poor, boss/worker, industrialized/Adeveloping@?

Converting our human commons into the patented properties of the wealthy

We are acting as if land, water, air, animals, plants and even our own germ plasm

Were mere commodities B manufactured goods for sale to those who can afford them

When in fact, our universe is a given, a gift, free, there without even an asking

A delicately balanced wonder which, parceled out, bartered, altered, owned or brutalized

Shrivels and ceases to sustain our most precious miracle B the biosphere and us within it

Water is being bottled and transported across oceans for the wealthy

While the Sahara desert expands, spurred by global warming

Splitting the atom has meant Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a legacy of monstrous newborns

The clear-cutting of forests and industrial fishing mean the massive extinction of species

Exploring other planets means potentially bringing back uncontrollable, deadly viruses

Surrogate motherhood means the intentional and unnatural corruption of maternal bonds

Embryo manipulation means designer children and a new biological eugenics

Splicing genes means the creation new life forms, lately a goat head with a sheep body

There was political conquest, and then economic conquest

We have now entered the age of biological imperialism

We must have a God in whose divinity we partake

We must devise a science that contextualizes and empathizes

We must redefine success as raising children who do not kill

We must respect our own evolution, even if we think it imperfect

We must nurture the lowliest algae for they form the basis of our food

We must rejoice in the diversity in which we were born

And if we don=t, we will die

Together with the planet we have plundered.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Eqbal, Terrorism B Theirs and Ours (Seven Stories, New York, N.Y.), 2001.

Ali, Tariq, The Clash of Fundamentalisms B Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (Verso, N.Y.), 2002.

Barlow, Maude, and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold B The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World=s Water (The New Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002.

Brook, James and Iain Boal, Eds., Resisting the Virtual Life B The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights, San Francisco, CA), 1995.

Caldicott, Helen, The New Nuclear Danger B George W. Bush=s Military-Industrial Complex (The New Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002.

deMause, Lloyd, The History of Childhood (Jason Aronson, Northvale, New Jersey), 1974.

Ellis, John, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD), 1975.

Grossman, Karl, Weapons in Space (Seven Stories, N.Y.), 2001.

Hammond, Edward, ABiological Warfare,@ TUC Radio, 06/15/02. Edward Hammond is Co-director of The Sunshine Project, 101 West 6^th Street, #607, Austin, TX 78701; Tel. 1-512-494-0545; www.sunshine-project.org.

Kimbrell, Andrew, The Human Body Shop B The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life (Gateway/Regnery, Washington, D.C.), 1997.

Kneen, Brewster, Farmageddon B Food and the Culture of Biotechnology (New Society, Gabriola Island, B.C., Canada), 1999.

Roy, Arundhati, Power Politics (South End), Cambridge, MA), 2001

Shiva, Vandana, Stolen Harvest B The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End, Cambridge, MA), 2000.

Acknowledgment

I stand upon the shoulders of giants. Only the most recent ones are listed above.