I’m currently reading a book entitled “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” written by Iraq veteran Roy Scranton, who basically tells us that human beings have pretty much screwed themselves due to the vast and rapidly-approaching nightmare of climate change. If this book was designed to scare the holy shite out of people, it certainly has succeeded.
According to Scranton, “Human civilization has thrived in what has been the most stable climate interval in 650,00 years. Thanks to carbon-fueled industrial civilization, that interval is over.” Boom.
But is anybody doing anything to stop this nightmare from happening? Only a few people are—mainly a small-but-courageous Indian tribe at Standing Rock, North Dakota. And what is America’s reaction to this heroic stand against death by carbon? We have just spent hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars trying to tear-gas them, harass them, arrest them, pepper-spray them and shoot rubber bullets at them. Way to go America! Or not.
Thank goodness for the Standing Rock Sioux. Like it or not, they are protecting us. They are standing in place instead of us. They are bravely standing in front of a hurricane of climate-death and are doing it in our name. And all we do to thank them is to pay for the militarized police’s tear gas, dogs and bullets that attack them.
I propose another way to thank the Standing Rock Sioux. Let’s all go to Standing Rock this Thanksgiving—and show them that we really do have something to be truly thankful for.
PS: If you can’t figure out how to get all the way to the Standing Rock Reservation, then consider having your Thanksgiving dinner in front of the Capitol building in Bismarck instead. Can’t make it there either? How about Thanksgiving dinner in front of the US Congress or the White House.
PPS: Standing Rock protestors, Black Lives Matter, various Chicano movements and Occupy are practically the only true Americans these days—Americans who are courageous enough to actually stand up to the US military-industrial complex that is gobbling up the rest of us alive. We should honor these protestors instead of bombing them with tear gas and attacking them with dogs.
The rest of us whine and grieve that we are losing everything—but do nothing to stop it and just go along.
PPPS: Aside from being victims of the climate-change hurricane that is now bearing down upon us post-haste, Standing Rock is also just more collateral damage right now (along with Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, etc.) in the neo-con “wars” for oil. But who knows who the next “collateral damage” will be? Probably us.
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