Solidarity
By Charles Sullivan
10 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
We
are living in extraordinarily dangerous times, when evil, rather than
justice, prevails. The schoolyard is terrorized by thugs and punks with
names like Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Robertson, Clinton, Rockefeller,
Rice, Rumsfeld, Perle, Kristol and Giuliani—pedigreed people all.
In an inconspicuous corner
of the schoolyard, the good people—and they are legion—keep
to themselves, afraid. No one wants to be hurt; and the thugs and punks
are dangerous, even criminally insane people. They have terrible weapons
and criminal gangs who patrol the schoolyard to intimidate and terrorize,
looking for those who talk to others; looking for signs of organization
and resistance. The good people have witnessed their maiming and killing
countless times. They have every reason to be afraid.
An aberration of nature,
the blood of the punks and thugs is not red like ours; it is green,
the color of money. They have an insatiable thirst for blood—our
blood; the blood of all innocents. Blood money is their currency. Through
some kind of strange alchemy, they are able to convert blood into money
to own the world.
Every aspect of the schoolyard:
the church, the Federal Reserve, the banks, the workplace, the corporation,
and the militia are under their control. Not only do the thugs and killers
have weapons, they have chemical and nuclear weapons, doomsday machines
by the dozen. They have no regard for life, human and non-human alike.
They are incapable of rational thought guided by just principles. The
world, every inch of it, belongs to them. They are its rightful masters,
so they think—holding patents on life’s genetic blueprints;
gods among mortal beings, without limitations. They are our all knowing
superiors and we are their helpless, foolish children tugging anxiously
at their pant legs, vying for attention.
The thugs and punks are aggressive
without restraint, and they wear the garments of priests and saints
and public service. Their minds are disturbed, their hands stained with
the blood of the innocent. Their conscience, if it exists at all, is
unstained by guilt or principle. Their decadent, wrinkled bodies are
devoid of soul, sustained by the embalming fluid of the walking dead.
Their ancestors were the
inventors of chattel slavery; ours were their servants who worked the
fields and died in their wars. Their ancestors tormented and eradicated
the aboriginal peoples under the flag of religion and manifest destiny—testaments
to their stupendous strength and superiority; ours were the vanquished
and oppressed.
It was their ancestors who
busted the unions of our ancestors, who killed our ancestral kin at
Wounded Knee; at Ludlow and the McCormick Reaper Works at Chicago, and
thousands of other places like those. It was their ancestors who shot
Joe Hill in Utah and lynched Frank Little from a railroad trestle in
Butte, Montana.
And it was them who murdered
hope and kept fear alive; a fear that stalks and haunts us to this day:
a horror that has given the Manitou of Dick Cheney to the present like
the kiss of Judas; a specter of endless war and war profiteers that
parasitizes the innocent and the just, with the insatiable appetite
of maggots that feed on the decaying flesh of the dead.
The thugs and punks are not
like us. They know they are superior to us and to everyone; to every
being on this planet. We are not of their class, the descendants of
wealth and property, with social pedigrees obtained through terror and
mayhem. They and their ancestors have always been the terrorists, and
we and our ancestors have always been the terrorized.
The present is a manifestation
of an unbroken chain of events converging from the distant past. The
reign of terror can be ended, must be ended, by breaking the chain and
casting its hefty iron links into the sea. The bullies, the punks and
thugs terrorize the schoolyard because they were not dealt with in the
past. We did not arrive at this important moment in history by chance.
Cause and effect brought us here. Those in the present are reaping what
was sown by those who came before us, just as the future will be the
result of what we do now.
Most of those in the schoolyard,
aside from the thugs and punks, are peace loving people. They do not
want trouble, so they knuckle under and do what they are told, and the
decay continues to spread like a dark plague of pitiless death that
blots out the sun. Like ghastly cadavers, the good and the innocent
lie in quiet repose, paralyzed by fear and uncertainty, unable or unwilling
to act in their own defense.
Because the social disease
that leads to injustice and war was never adequately addressed, it persists;
it festers and mortifies. Our gangrened limbs blacken, stink, and fall
by the wayside in response to festering injustice. The sickening stench
that envelops us is the half buried corpses of our ancestors clamoring
for truth; screaming not for vengeance, but for justice. We pretend
that we do not hear, but a deafening crescendo of the dead is rising
all around and within us, too awful, too persistent to be ignored indefinitely;
a nightmare that haunts and tortures our sleep, our every waking moment.
The chain must be broken
or it will continue to grow and it will beat down our children and our
children’s children. It is a frightening and troublesome thought,
but it is wholly rational and based upon convincing physical evidence.
History has borne ample witness to these events, as we bear witness
to them now. It explains both past and present, and it portends an ever
worsening future—a nightmare worse than all of those of the past
added together; for injustice, like cancer, does not grow linear—like,
but like crystals of quartz; it grows exponentially, like atoms unleashed
in a nuclear explosion that consumes the world in fire and smoke.
In the end, there is only
one way to remove the thugs and punks from our schoolyard. It is to
face them down, not alone, which would be suicidal, but in unison, for
we outnumber them millions to one. Unity, solidarity and justice are
more powerful forces than hate and violence, just as surely as truth
is superior to lies, life is preferable to death; and freedom is preferable
to imprisonment and servitude. The disparate parts of solidarity already
exist in broken disarray at our feet: We have only to bring them together
in a continuous chain of ironclad unity.
There are risks involved.
Success is not guaranteed. But without just opposition to terror just
outcomes are not possible. So we need courage and faith that translates
into principled action—and solidarity. It is high time to call
the punks and thugs out into the open. Those who are ruled by fear cannot
be guided by justice. Justice demands that we have this fight—us
against them.
Charles Sullivan
is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and community activist
residing in the Ridge and Valley Province of geopolitical West Virginia.
He welcomes your comments at [email protected].
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