There is another kind of revolution, one that does not emerge from the culture, from philosophy, from theory, from thought abstracted from sense, but instead from our bodies, and from the land. It, too, is a part of this language older than words. It is the honeybee who stings in defense of the larger being that is her hive; it is the mother grizzly who charges again and again the train that took from her the two sons she carried inside, and that mangled their bodies beyond all motherly recognition; it is the women who submits to her rapist, knowing it's better to be violated then murdered, but who begins to fight when he reaches for the knife, or the hammer; it is Zapatista spokesperson Cecelia Rodriguez, who says, "I have a question of those men who raped me. Why did you not kill me? It was a mistake to spare my life. I will not shut up...this has not traumatized me to the point of paralysis." It is the indigenous Zapatistas, who declare, "There are those who resign themselves to being slaves...But there are those who do not resign themselves, there are those who decide to be uncomfortable, there are those who do not sell themselves, there are those who no not surrender themselves...
There are those who decide to fight. In any place in the world, anytime, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and that cynicism has dyed grey. Any man, any woman, of whatever colour in whatever tongue says to herself, 'Enough already!" It is Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urge of Shell Oil, whose last words were, "Lord, take my soul but the struggle continues!" It is the U'wa people of South America, a part of whose community committed mass suicide 400 years ago by walking off a fourteen-hundred-foot cliff rather than submit to Spanish rule, and whoe living members today vow to follow their ancestors if Occidental Petroleum and Shell move in to destroy their land. It is the U'wa woman who says, "I sing the traditional songs to my children. I teach them that EVERYTING IS SACRED AND LINKED [my capitals...]. How can I tell Shell and Oxy that to take petrol is for us worse than killing your own mother? If you kill the Earth, then no one will live. I do not want to die. Nobody does." It is anyone who dares to think and speak for him- or herself. It is Nestor Makhno fighting for his Ukranian homeland and for the autonomy of those who work the land, against the Germans, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Bolsheviks again, the Whites again, and again the Bolsheviks. It is the men and women who participated inthe Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is those who rebelled at Treblinka. It is Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple. It is the women and men who lock themselves down in front of bulldozers. It is the Chipko movement in India, begun by women who clung tight to trees so the woodmen's axes would bite into their own, and not the trees', flesh. It is Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo. It is the salmon battering themselves against the concrete, using the only thing they have, their flesh, to try to break down that which keeps them from their homes.
It is not the attempt to sieze power or the industrial 'means of production,' but it is actions based upon the instinctual drive to survive, and to live with dignity.
This is not political theory. It is not philosophy. It is not religion. It is remembering what it means to love and to be alive.
It is to learn the power of the word no. No more clearcuts. No more tumors on turtles. No more genocide. No more slavery, niether our own nor others.
So long as we, or I, continue to discuss this in the abstract, we, or I, still have too much to lose. Presumably the mother grizzly did not find herself paralyzed by theoretical discussions of what is right or wrong, and presumably the same rule is true for the woman who takes the weapons from her attacker's hands. If we only begin to feel in our bodies the immensity of what we are losing - intact ecosystems, hours sold for wages, childhoods lost to violence, women's capacity to walk unafraid - we will know precisely what we need to do.
Any revolution on the outside - any breaking down of current power structures - with no corresponding revolution in percieving, being and thinking, will merely further destruction, genocide, and ecocide. Any revolution on the inside - a revolution of the heart - which does not lead to a revolution on the outside plays just as false.
Anton Chekov once said that he would like to read a story about a man who squeezes every drop of slave's blood from himself. That is first what we must do. For when a slave rebels without challenging the entire notion of slavery, we merely encounter a new boss. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, what emerges is a free man or woman, and not even death can stop those who are free.
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