The Third World War Rages On (from oil fields to city streets and beyond)
By Mickey Z.
15 February, 2013
Countercurrents.org
“We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.” - Daniel Quinn
Yet another black teenager lies bleeding on the sidewalk—having become the target of 11 shots fired by two soldiers in Mayor Bloomberg’s Private Army™. The wounded teen’s request of “Please don’t let me die” brings a stark reply: “Stay down, or we’ll shoot you again.”
This is what war looks like.
As much as the roar of a predator drone or the whir of a depleted uranium shell, this is what war sounds like.
The inevitable din of conflicting stories—with the Blue Bloc swearing all the local witnesses are lying and yes, the kid did possess and point a gun—is as loud as any bomb.
Kimani “Kiki” Gray, 16, died in Brooklyn (just hours after the NYPD shot another man in Staten Island) and the sounds echoing through a hospital corridor as Kiki’s mother Carol faints are the sounds of war.
The news reports about nightly vigils for Kiki are war conducted by other means. Even the headlines smell like napalm: “Vigil for Brooklyn Teenager Fatally Shot by the Police Turns Violent.”
A “Brooklyn teenager” is “fatally shot by the police,” but the word “violent”—the literal concept of violence—is fastidiously reserved by the newspaper of record for describing what some mourners may or may not have done after the vigil—two days after yet another black teenager lay bleeding on the sidewalk.
Elsewhere, we learn from the corporate media how a “disorderly group” (vigil goers, not cops) “wrought havoc” and pulled their sweatshirt hoods up, “apparently an effort to be harder to identify.” No mention, of course, of Bloomberg’s soldiers regularly wearing riot masks and covering their badge numbers while descending upon a scene.
From the media—these stenographers of power—we hear of “an unruly young mob thrashing its way through local businesses” but are told nothing about an unruly NYPD mob thrashing its way through communities of color.
The deafening clamor of war echoes from the city streets to the oil fields and beyond.
Every time a human is told s/he cannot visit her/his dying partner in the hospital because they are not married—because they are not allowed to be married—that rejection is what war sounds like.
When a person in a wheelchair hears “sorry, but we’re not accessible” or “sorry, but the elevator is broken” or “sorry, but just about every structure in we build in every city in every nation is off limits,” it sounds like war.
Each time a subway announcement drones, “Ladies and gentlemen, soliciting money in the subway is illegal. We ask you not to give. Please help us to maintain an orderly subway” as a homeless person shakes his/her tattered cups for coins, it sounds like war.
When a woman on any dark street, anywhere on the planet, feels her heart rate quicken when she hears footsteps behind (what Robin Morgan calls the “democracy of fear”), it sounds like war.
The echo of mountaintops being blown off to claim the coal beneath? That’s what war sounds like.
The hum of the chainsaw, the thud of the trees, as forests are clearcut? The sounds of war.
The assault of sacred lands in the name of tar sands? This is what war sounds like.
The clawing and scraping of those sentient souls confined at a fur farm or puppy mill or battery cage, the howls that reverberate down the hallways of vivisection labs, the shrieks emanating from veal crates, the warning cry of a blue whale pursued by harpoons…these, and so much more, are the sounds of an omni-cidal global war.
Each and every time any living being literally or metaphorically begs, “Please don’t let me die” but is told, literally or metaphorically, “Stay down, or we’ll shoot you again,” we are witness to the brutal, yet unmistakable logic of war.
All our grief, all our grievances, are connected.
All activism is anti-war activism now. We didn’t declare this war but we must fight it and we must win it.
The 1% and their proxy armies are waging war upon all forms of life, leaving each of us to answer—ASAP—the most fundamental of questions: Which side are you on?
I’ll see you at the barricades, comrades…
#shifthappens
NYC Event Notes: To continue conversations like this, come see Mickey Z. in person:
March 19: "Occupy for All Species: Social Justice in the Age of Climate Change"
http://www.facebook.com/events/408951385862842
March 24: Veggie Pride Parade
http://www.facebook.com/events/569308466432670/
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