March 14, 2009

Unfathomable

My body groans, squeezed in a vise,

My entrails revolt,

My heart stops beating,

My blood freezes,

My mind asks, “Why? Why? Why?”

The destruction of life

Is not the fantasy

Of a deranged, fragmented self.

It is reality, as I write,

Happening quickly, irreversibly, self-perpetuatingly.

Land depleted by a “green revolution,”

Oceans full of “dead zones,”

The atmosphere chaotic,

Food, water, air contaminated,

Species disappearing on a massive scale.

Polar bears drowning,

Human breast milk a toxic substance.

True or false tests have won the day!

What is the price of a forest? The price of its board feet of “standing timber.”

What is the price of a river? The cost of cleaning up its pollution.

What is the price of a human life? The amount of its foregone wages.

What is meant by “sustainable development”? Exponentially increasing economic growth.

What is the price of a spotted owl? The number of jobs given up in order to save it.

What is the price of a mountain? The cost of its decapitation.

What is the price of stemming global warming? Too much for the capitalist ledger.

Yes, Little One (me, talking to my childhood self),

The dandelion you discovered at age four, is now laced with herbicide,

The pine to whom you sang in reverence, is now a managed monoculture,

The North Sea in which you swam, no longer supports fish,

The star-lit sky you adored, is heavy with pollution,

The frogs whose racket lulled you to sleep, are now silent, forever,

The ostentatiously-colored fish with whom you played, are starved out of their coral home.

The natural world is but a carcass of its former self.

Humans have a history of madness.

MAD (mutually-assured destruction) almost

Put an end to our species as we know it,

A fate avoided only because, off the coast of Cuba,

On October 27, 1962, while under attack by

United States destroyers, Soviet submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov

Blocked an order to respond with nuclear-armed torpedoes,

Thus preventing an almost certain a nuclear night.⁽¹⁾

Now, no single person can stop the craze.

Solidarity is the only trait which could turn the tide,

And that is a rare find in a society of alienated,

Self-centered, profit-seeking, atomized

“Happy robots” which capitalism has produced.

Their talk is about the “unusual weather,”

The latest scandal among those who overshoot the money game,

A few killings, here and there, in the oil wars,

Even the few millions starving in Gaza and the Sudan,

But they never see the disparity between those and the unfathomable crime being committed.

They speak of “getting the villains” who head the corporations,

“Switching” (supposedly painlessly) to renewable fuels,

Living more moral lives, consuming less, preserving our “natural capital,”

But the bombardment of advertisements to get us to buy, steadily intensifies,

And the rules of money accumulation are never questioned.

The re-organization of society along the lines of quality rather than quantity,

Enjoyment of being rather than having, the inner rather than the outer,

Sensing the human ecosystem among other ecosystems, all inter-related,

Remembering that anyone could be that child under the un-manned drone,

Knowing that the measure of a society is its treatment of its most needy member,

Those are unconscionable “communist,” “terrorist,” “extremist” transgressions,

Which, when they do arise, are immediately and violently crushed,

For if they held sway, capitalism could not survive.

They grope for the potential creativity of free thought,

They dream of a society organized around people rather than money.

The fish are well trained to not see the water it which they swim.

References

(1) Chomsky, Noam. 2003. Hegemony or survival – America’s quest for global dominance. Page 74. New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt/Metropolitan.

Generally:

Foster, John Bellamy. 2002. Ecology against capitalism. New York, N.Y.: Monthly Review.

Hightower, Jim, and Phillip Frazer, 2009. “Time for real Workplace Democracy, not the phony Company Version.” Hightower Lowdown, Volume 11, No. 3. March.

Kovel, Joel. 2002/2007. The enemy of nature – the end of capitalism or the end of the world? New York. N. Y.: Zed Books.

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