Because I live in Minnesota, we are continuing to hear about bridges and infrastructure while the rest of the country moves on to the story of the day. As I hear these conversations daily and all of the talk about the millions, billions, and even trillions needed for roads and bridges, I’ve been thinking about something written by Derrick Jensen in the book “Culture of Make Believe.”
In the United States about forty-two thousand people die per year because of auto collisions, nearly as many as the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam. Everybody knows someone who has died or been seriously injured in a car crash, yet cars have insinuated themselves into our social life – and our psyches – so thoroughly that we somehow accept these deaths as inevitable, or not schocking, as opposed to perceiving them for what they are: a direct and predictable result of choosing to base our economic and social systems on this particular piece of technology. What’s worse is that even more people die each year from respiratory illness stemming from auto-related airborne toxins than die from traffic crashes.
More teenagers are killed by cars across the U.S. every afternoon than the fourteen high schoolers gunned down in Littleton. Everybody says that living in an inner city is dangerous, that you’re going to get shot. But the truth is that because of car crashes, suburbs are statistically far more dangerous places to live.
His words hit me on two levels. First of all, he makes a good point about our acceptance of pollution and the loss of life as a price we are willing to pay for the freedom to drive wherever we want whenever we want (not to mention all of the other costs like dependence of foreign oil and all of the money and blood that has been wasted in that persuit).
But on another level, this kind of thinking gets under my skin. How many others ways have we been conditioned to accept the idea of death and destruction in ways that we haven’t even been thinking about?
I actually had to stop reading Jensen’s book for awhile because I found that as I was reading it I was getting depressed to the point that it was affecting my ability to get through the day. I’ve promised myself that I’m just taking a break and will go back to reading when I feel strong enough again to take it. But this book is filled with other examples. Whether its our history of genocide against Native People’s, slavery, racism, sexism or the examples of corporate mass murder (ie, Union Carbide in Bohpal, India) he is showing that our culture is actually rooted in destruction.
Jensen is trying in this book to understand the hate that breeds this destruction. And I think he’s on to something. Very early on in the book he writes about a conversation he had with a friend of his named John about the similarity between hate groups and corporations:
He said, “They’re cousins.”
I just listened.
“Nobody talks about this,” he said, “but they’re branches from the same tree, different forms of the same cultural imperative…”
“Which is?”
“To rob the world of is subjectivity.”
“Wait – ” I said.
“Or to put this another way,” he continued, “to turn everyone and everything into objects.”
Jensen goes on to talk about how these forms of objectifying everyone and everything (therefore leading to hatred and destruction) have become so transparent that we don’t even see them anymore. One of his examples of this is his surprise in finding out that, even though the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 defines hate crimes as “a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim…because of the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person,” the FBI does NOT define rape as a hate crime. In other words, we have lived so long with the hatred of women as demonstrated by the crime of rape, that the hatred has become transparent.
This, it seems to me, is why so many men get so defensive when accused of being sexist and why so many white people get defensive when we are accused of being racist. We literally can’t see it anymore. Here’s how Jensen puts it:
The problem we have in answering (or even asking) these questions comes from the fact that hatred felt long enough and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred. If feels like economics, or religion, or tradition, or simply the way things are.
We’re fighting an uphill battle folks – trying like hell to maintian our subjectivity and connection to each other and the environment that sustains us in the face of tremendous odds. Trying to keep our eyes open to the objectification when everything around us is trying to blind us to its ever-present reality. Here’s how Jensen describes our challenge:
Although we pretend we don’t know, we know, and because we know we try all the harder not to know, and to eradicate all of those who do, cursing and enslaving those who see us as we are, and who dare to speak of our nakedness, and cursing and enslaving especially those parts of ourselves which attempt to speak. But speak they will…All of this causes what passes for discourse to quickly become absurd, frantically so, as people say everthing but the obvious.
We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absudity as normal, or to not see it at all.
