In his book, “A Language Older Than Words,” Derrick Jensen writes of the relationship between the abuse he endured as a child at the hands of his father and the abuse civilization perpetuates upon humans-- especially indigenous peoples, women and children-- and non-humans. In other words, the violent family is a microcosm to the macrocosm of a violent civilization.
A friend loaned me Jensen’s book as I was going through my own process of recovering from an abusive childhood. It took me more than half a year to read it, not because of its length, but because so much of this beautifully-written book is full of pain: the pain of a lost childhood, the pain of the devastation of forest and salmon, the pain of animal testing, the pain of enslavement, the pain of debilitating disease. And yet Jensen is also dogged if not in his hope then in his determination to survive, to persevere in the face of forces driven to annihilate us all.
As I have worked through the shock, rage, sadness and loss of my own childhood, as I have let go of the myth that the family I grew up in was a-little-dysfunctional-but-basically-loving, I have begun to see past the myth of our culture, our nation as a-little-unequal-but-still-basically-good. I am starting to see how we, the upper, middle and even the working classes of the U.S., have been anesthetized, while our government and the transnational corporations have operated with impunity, wreaking havoc on humans and the environment in the name of greed. We live in a system that forces us to work longer hours than virtually any other industrialized nation (400 hours more per year than the French) and assaults us with the most sophisticated advertising ever produced to convince us that we must have the products touted to be whole human beings, to be valuable, to be loveable, so that we spend our scant leisure time shopping on-line or at the mall or zoning out in front of the television set, absorbing more advertising.
This systemic anesthetizing process goes hand-in-hand with our individual needs to cope with the long-term effects of domestic violence. In a country where one out of every three to four women and one out of every five to seven men have been sexually abused as children, where spanking is still condoned and beatings are common, where emotional and verbal abuse are rife, is it any wonder that we try to numb the pain with everything from substance abuse to work to shopping to sports to on-line porn? All while clinging to our belief that it-really-wasn’t-all-that-bad, our parents were only trying to teach us discipline when they took off their belt, only trying to show their love for us when they reached into our pants, only trying to teach us self-control when they screamed at us at the top of their lungs, just as their parents had done to them.
Meanwhile, our lifestyle, comfortable beyond our great-grandparents’ imagination, with central heating, automobiles, digital gadgets, hot showers, convenience meals, clothes in every color, etc, etc, etc, is based on extracting natural resources in ways and amounts which are so completely unsustainable as to be rapacious. Rape, literal and metaphorical, along with murder, torture, and institutionalized poverty are tools used to control those who resist the destruction of the land and her creatures. These atrocities, committed overseas or in our own poorest ghettos and reservations, happen out of sight, even of the TV cameras. If the people of a wealthy U.S. suburb like Plano, Texas or Palo Alto, California were to riot because their water was supplied by a foreign company which was raising rates to one-quarter of the average person’s monthly salary, that would be news. But when the same thing happens in a poor city on another continent, CNN and Fox News are nowhere in sight. The dumping of toxic chemicals into rivers, the employment of children in sweat-shops, the clear-cutting of forests, the birth defects resulting from radiation poisoning, these do not make the evening news, not least because their very prevalence, their “normality,” the very fact that they are not new, keeps them from being considered newsworthy.
If we can take off our blinders, unplug ourselves from the mass media, and remove the layers of denial, perhaps we can gather the courage to confront the reality of our lives and of our world, to see the damage done to us and the damage done by us, directly and indirectly. Perhaps we can see reach out to heal each other and together change direction from violence to peace, or at least from destruction to survival.
