Little Big House on the Prairie Dog
Exciting News! Here in Ohio where I live, if you’ve been vaccinated, you can enter a raffle to win $1 million smackeroos!
Wow, imagine dishing out that kind of juicy incentive to get people to stop fucking destroying the ever living shit out of the motherloving Earth!
We must remember, the vaccine is primarily about saving the economy, not lives. If any of this shit show we call industrial capitalistic civilization were truly about “saving lives” (and not just about merely keeping us alive long enough to either profit off of or exploit) then we would be rewarded for living in balance with the Earth. Pollution and habitat destruction cause way more deaths (and not just human deaths) than the virus has or will (although, the next virus — caused by even further encroachment of nature, because spoiler alert, we have learned ZILCH from this pandemic — could be much deadlier than covid).
Air pollution alone causes at least 7 million deaths annually worldwide. 9 out of 10 humans live in areas where the air “exceeds guideline limits of pollutants”. Most of the air pollution used to be primarily found in the East because of all the factories but now there are so many dang forest fires here in the Western world that the air quality has really gone to shit too. We used to be like, “Hey China, can’t you figure out how to make all of our crap for us without polluting the air? Geesh!” But now China is all like “Record setting wildfires much, America?”
And get this, air pollution actually makes covid MORE deadly! Long term exposure to fine particulate matter called PM2.5 is linked to a greater chance of dying from COVID-19.
‘PM2.5’ sounds like the improved next generation version of a natural sleep aid supplement, so how bad could it be, right? Try “increasing the risk of dying from covid by at least 11%” bad. PM2.5 pollution is caused primarily by the combustion from car engines and coal/gas power plants.
But some of the most dangerous pollutants are those not even in the air, like the class of chemicals known as PFAS, which compromise our immune systems making it harder for our bodies to fight off viruses. PFAS are found in most food packaging, most make-up and shampoo, sunscreen, non stick cook-ware, anything labeled “stain-resistant” or “water resistant” or “water repellent”…speaking of water, PFAS are also found in most drinking water samples! Being the most consumerist country in the world where we practically buy PFAS in bulk, 95% of us now have “unsafe” levels of PFAS in our systems! But the good news is that 95% of us are now also “stain-resistant”, so that’s convenient! These chemicals linger in our bodies and in the environment for decades (Oh, real quick, capitalist industrial civilization wanted me to remind you that our bodies and the environment are definitely totally separate from one another). PFAS actually could persist longer than that, we haven’t been making them all that long so we just don’t know, but one thing we can count on is that corporations and the governments that are supposed to regulate them are sticking to their strict credo of “Make a bunch of super sketchy untested products now and ask questions never because by the time they figure it out they’ll all be dead and we’ll be playing a round of space golf at Elon Musk’s exclusive Platinum Mars Resort with a re-animated Jeffrey Epstein.”
The vaccine is ultimately the equivalent to making full body flame retardant suits for everyone so we can keep living in our collective house that is on fire (Did I say everyone? Those living in the basement will have to wait for patent waivers from the boys upstairs to get their protective suits. Wait, what am I saying, the boys aren’t upstairs, duh, they are nowhere near the flaming house, they are on their secret island fortress far far away from all the fire and smoke). Since doing the logical humane thing of trying to put the fire out will make no profit for the rich whatsoever, the rich have mastered the art of buying time (which is a fiscally sound investment since time is at a record low price) by making all sorts of pledges that they are going to put the fire out by 2030 or 2050 or whatever date sounds most believable to us (they are still workshopping that date). Meanwhile, they keep marketing a whole manner of products to make being slowly burned alive as pleasant as possible but also happen to — wah wah — fuel the fire!…products like “green” lighter fluid that promises to be 100% non flammable by whatever year is way too late but still makes us think our kids will somehow be fine.
Apart from pollution, poverty also causes premature death. The pandemic was smartly pounced upon as an opportunity by which to widen the wealth gap even more…. instead of fixing all the racial, gender, and economic inequalities that the pandemic has shone a huge spotlight on for everyone to see plain as day. No, don’t be silly Mr. Spotlight, those aren’t modern day slaves, those are “essential workers”! And thanking them for doing a job they are forced to do for an unlivable wage is better than giving them any kind of a raise or relief. Remember, we may be more divided than ever but we are still all in this division “together”. And isn’t the ‘wealth gap’ such a fun innocuous way to describe the grotesque immoral disparity between the unfathomably rich and the abject poor…The Wealth Gap — it sounds like a store in the mall where you can get blinged out khakis!
Sadly, there’s no vaccine yet for being poor. And even if there was, there would be no way to profit off it because those who need it can’t pay!….Oh wait, I just remembered from Kindergarten, there IS an antidote for poverty, it’s called fucking SHARING, something we are taught to do as toddlers but then at the same fucking time we’re also conditioned to be way too paranoid, untrusting, and hyper-individualistic to actually ever fucking share in any kind of large scale radical capacity that could fucking end poverty tomorrow, done and done. Just like how we could’ve stopped the virus from spreading in no time if everyone had worn masks and social distanced AND was financially supported to do so by a government that gives over 10 million dollars a day to Israel so they can follow in our colonizing footsteps by violently kicking Palestinians out of their homes. But running that sensible playbook called PREVENTION wouldn’t have made ANY money for large pharmaceutical companies who put a patent on deciding who lives and who dies, and without that kind of diabolical behavior draped in entrepreneurial freedomwashing how would we even recognize this place as America? That would’ve been way too confusing for everyone and maybe even would have led to America having some kind of identity crisis!
No, instead of being encouraged to do anything that would cause less long term suffering and destruction, we are highly incentivized on a daily basis to literally kill the Earth in the most complex and convoluted roundabout ways all for the profit and comfort of a few and the short term suffering of many (and we are made to think that stopping the killing is totally out of our hands because it’s the “invisible hand of the market” that is controlling everything! Pretty hard to fight a giant hand that you can’t even see!).
We are forced and coerced and bribed and blackmailed and encouraged and enticed to do the most terrible horrific destructive unkind things (directly and indirectly) in order to survive within these man made systems (by ‘man’ I mean MEN)…..but this short term insular survival greatly diminishes the possibility that anything is going to survive outside of these systems. While we’re busy “surviving” and complying with so much bullshit that is designed to pacify us, to distract us, to exhaust us, and to keep our eyes on the prize, the actual REAL WORLD is disappearing at an ever alarming rate. I mean, wasn’t that cool last month when someone caught a 240 lb. 7ft long 100+ year old Lake Sturgeon in the Detroit river! What a neat way to realize how the world that the bulk of our ancestors knew is all but gone. Lake Sturgeons are now just down to 1–2% of their historic populations. Many Indigenous tribes such as the Menominee, Winnebago, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, Oneida and Sauk of the Great Lakes Basin all relied on and revered this ancient fish, which at 136 million years is as old as the dinosaurs! They can grow up to 16 feet long and weigh up to 800 pounds and live up to 150 years! Kinda embarrassing for them that they managed to survive whatever treacherous forces that killed off the dinosaurs only to be done in by some pale skinned apes with no foresight because they had pushed out and or massacred those apes who had some.
European settlers considered Lake Sturgeon to be a real nuisance because these huge feisty fish were always breaking their fishing gear and ripping thru their nets. So they slaughtered a whole bunch of them out of spite and left them for dead. Guess the settlers didn’t think to ask the Natives how they managed to catch these great beasts. But then in the late 1800’s, white guy fishermen finally started figuring out how to catch them and eat them (with no help from the Natives I might add! Geesh!). During the period of heavy commercial fishing of Lake Sturgeon, from 1879 to 1900, the catch in the Great Lakes averaged over 1,814 metric tons (4 million pounds). In 1885, a maximum of 4,901 metric tons (8.6 million pounds) was harvested, of which 2,359 tons (5.2 million pounds) came from Lake Erie. By the mid 1900’s, 80% of the Lake Sturgeon had been removed from Lake Erie. In the late 1970’s, Canadian commercial operations in Lake Erie reported harvests of only 1.36 - 2.27 metric tons (3 to 5 thousand pounds). In 1929, commercial fishing of Lake Sturgeon was shut down in Lake Michigan after the catch plummeted to only 2000 pounds compared to 3.8 million pounds harvested just 60 years earlier in 1879.
But forget about all that for a sec! Won’t this cool pic look great on a Pintrest board?!?!
Five dams along the Menominee River were built in the early 1900s to help move logs along the river for timber operations. But later on, white men were like “now that we’ve cut down all the biggest trees and don’t need to float their murdered corpses down stream, how can we best use these dams to further fuck shit up for everything and everyone but us?” So these dams got converted into producing hydro-electricity (which never makes sense to me because water plus electricity = electrocution, no?) So Lake Sturgeon, like salmon, travel upstream to spawn, so these dams were a big blow to an already dwindled population. But don’t fret! A new program is in place today that has put in fish elevators — if you can imagine that! — so that the Sturgeons traveling upstream can get around the dams! Brilliant! Once the elevators raise them up to the surface, they are caught, put in the back of a truck and driven the rest of the way! You’re welcome, Lake Sturgeon! Take a load off, you deserve it!
Hey, what about just removing the dams altogether? Nope, because how else would we generate the electricity to run the fish elevators?!...AND power the electric fish-escorting trucks everyone is going to be issued under Czar Elon Musk’s ensuing reign of terror? Duh, think about it. No, best to trust that it’s MUCH easier to take a creature that had no ecological footprint and give it one by making it dependent on industrial energy extraction for their very survival.
SIGH.
Practically everything we do within these shit systems murders the Earth to death….one hamburger, one truck ride for fish, one fidget spinner, one vaccine, one stain resistant carpet, one email attachment, one unrecyclable almond milk container, one blinged out pair of khakis, one Pintrest board, one everything at a time.
Ha ha, WHOOPSIE DAISY! Am I being a bummer? Sorry, MY BAD!
To lighten things up a bit why don’t I share some great shots I took of Prairie Dogs in their new natural habitat: the TV show floor of Costco! Can you believe the color and clarity???? You won’t get that level of high definition in a REAL prairie! It’s like, do we even still have real prairies???? Because if they don’t POP like this flat screen image does then I’m not interested, sir!
FUN FACT: You wouldn’t guess it after a trip to Costco but Prairie Dogs are also down to only 1% of their historic populations. And you’re not going to believe this but it’s actually that sweet sweet Costco life we’re living that is part of what is doing them in! What a twist, huh! Didn’t see that comin’, did ya?! Lady Irony, you sneaky devil woman, you! But no worries, governments around the world are pledging that they can get irony down to pre-industrial levels by 2050, the plan is called Net Zero.
Don’t believe me about Prairie Dogs? Well have a listen to this heartbreaking interview on the Greenroot Podcast with prairie dog advocate extraordinaire Deanna Meyer. Or this devastating one….
FUNNER FACT: As you can see from the banner in the photos I took, Costco is offering big CASH BACK savings if you open up a credit card today!!!!! Don’t wait!!!!! The Prairie Dogs aren’t holding their breath and you shouldn’t either! Get while the getting is good!
MOST FUNNEST FACT: As long as we keep living the COSTCO life — totally detached from the consequences of our actions — then we will never ever be able to bring the Prairie Dog or the California Condor (down to only 160, and 1/10th of them live at this lady’s house, trashing the hell out of her deck) or the Vaquita Porpoise (down to only 6–22 individuals, in 1997 there were 600) or the Monarch Butterfly (only 1,900 were counted this year in CA — that’s scary low btw — last year 29,000 were counted — in the 1990’s there were millions) or the Giraffe (now on the endangered species list? wtf!) back up to their “historic*” populations (*a euphemistic way to say “before white colonizers done fucked shit up”).
Never before have Martin Luther King Jr.’s words he spoke to his friend Harry Belafonte right before he was murdered by the federal government with the help of local police been more literally true….
“I’ve come upon something that disturbs me deeply. We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I’ve come to believe we’re integrating into a burning house.”
The metaphorical house he was referring to was a morally corrupt capitalistic militaristic Empire that is destined to fall.
But now that house is the actual literal living planet.
We are running out of time for anyone at all to “win” (as MLK was so sure we would. Turns out the moral arc of the Universe bends towards convicting George Floyd’s murderer on the same day a black teenage girl is shot dead by police in Columbus, OH. But if the girl’s family has been vaccinated they could enter to win $1 million dollars!!! Not too shabby!). It can’t be about winning anymore. Winning within the context of these systems always means someone or something else loses, and loses in a way that ultimately hurts everything.
MLK also once said “What good does it do to sit at the counter when you cannot afford a hamburger?”
And today, even when you CAN afford it, that cheap hamburger is still one of the leading causes of environmental degradation. The Earth itself cannot afford that hamburger. The future of all living things cannot afford it. I see so many people on social media in support of the McDonalds employee strike for a $15 wage. McDonalds could afford to pay their employees triple that without having to raise the price of their “food” and STILL make a stinking profit! While I certainly don’t want McDonald employees to live in poverty, at this stage in the collapse of the biosphere this is the wrong fight. We should be fighting for McDonalds not to exist at all! Fighting for those kind of jobs not to exist at all! Fighting for NO PAYING JOBS TO EXIST!!!!!!! Fighting for access to the remaining remnants of what’s left of our huddled humanity that hasn’t been completely swallowed up by the propaganda and brainwashing we undergo that gets us to go along with utterly absurd systems engineered to oppress and reward us for oppressing those beneath us on this man made (as in MEN) human pyramid.
But we get behind such piecemeal campaigns like the McDonalds one because….say it with me now, “IT’S BETTER THAN NOTHING”.
This is the pep rally cry of our demise.
At what point will nothing actually be better?
At what point do we actually do what’s best and turn away from that which is not real? Back towards what is.
Things like begging for wage increases and winning court cases are the faux struggles they want all of us to focus on, so we don’t turn on the systems themselves and those who control them.
But we simply don’t know how to operate outside these systems, like an animal born in captivity who never learned the ways of the wild, we’re afraid we’d be helpless (Oop, Industrial Civilization has another reminder for you: humans are in no way animals so this analogy is irrelevant, please dismiss it).
I tried to make this point recently on Twitter….
And then ex-presidential candidate and self-help new-age guru Marianne Williamson belittled me in front of all of Twitter!….
Williamson writes in her best-selling book ‘A Return to Love’…..“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”
I don’t think our biggest fear is that we are too powerful, that’s dumb (but makes for some compelling spiritual quackery). I think our biggest fear is that we will not have enough because we all were raised in a sick sick culture founded on the driving idea of never ever having enough. It’s a culture that has made us believe the economy is more dependable than the Earth and more dependable than we could be to each other. It’s a culture fueled by both manufactured scarcity and a false sense of abundance, as well as a community destroying concept of “mine”. This cruel unjust man made (as in MEN) world is the only world we know and the thought of existing in a different unknown reality, one not based on constantly having to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is what really scares us. We will never really want to leave the burning building as long as they keep us afraid that what is outside the burning building is even worse than being burned alive. As long as they convince us that progress can be made within the building (it just takes time but we’re getting there! Gender equality is ONLY going to take 99 years! Yes, the pandemic has pushed that back to 151 years but don’t worry because if we keep producing and ingesting PFAS then pretty soon we will be done with genders altogether because everyone’s severely dysfunctional endocrine systems will have made us all hermaphrodites!) then we won’t ever even think about leaving. Plus they keep releasing new shiny bootstrap models that make our old perfectly fine bootstraps obsolete! Par Example…
I guess the ‘Return to love’ that Marianne speaks of involves always returning to the hand that feeds us, that disciplines us, that oppresses us, that makes us abide by imaginary laws instead of the laws of nature, that stops us from taking control of our destiny TOGETHER instead of betting on the whims of the corrupt judiciary system. That’s not love. Let’s ask black radical feminist revolutionary living in exile Assata Shakur what she thinks of that?
Marianne didn’t reply back to me, but you’ll be glad to hear that her snippy attack on my tweet has not hurt my reputation on Twitter AT ALL! I still am receiving, on average, 0-2 likes per tweet. See, LOOK!…..
But seriously, at what point do we stop looking to the prison guards for our freedom? When do we realize that our life has been used to build and maintain the prison! At what point do those of us in minimum security realize the door isn’t even locked and we have a duty to leave and try to free those trapped in maximum security and solitary confinement.
A tsunami is coming, and coming sooner than we think, and the only solutions and emergency procedures the prison wardens are proposing are promising us all personalized shoeboxes (by 2050) that we can climb up on for safety. THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH. That’s not nearly high enough! Didn’t we learn anything at all from poor Lester in the beloved theatrical American classic ‘Tremors’? We need to get WAY higher!!!!! (No, Elon Musk, Mars is TOO high!)
Plus the wardens leave out how they will have to mine a bunch of shit to make all these shoeboxes, leaving huge craters in the Earth! Oh great, now we’re actually lower than ground level for when the tsunami comes.
And we’ve been trained up real good to do most of the wardens’ work for them by saying Hey we don’t want or need your lousy mandated shoeboxes because we are going to make our own shoeboxes!…..Although we will need to buy all the raw materials and tools from you to make them. How about making NO SHOEBOXES AT ALL. BECAUSE THAT’S NOT A SOLUTION. FORGET ABOUT THE SHOEBOXES. FORGET I EVER MENTIONED THEM!
Seriously, we need an exit strategy from this burning building. We need to help one another head for the highest ground possible. We need to be building arcs — literal and figurative ones — not shoeboxes (is she still using the weird shoebox analogy?).
Oh but with these exclusive membership savings I can just buy shoeboxes in bulk and stack them up so high!!!! Man, does it ever feel classy to be a VIP member! Way classier than being a member of a functioning healthy ecosystem. If Prairie Dogs had their way, VIP would stand for Very Important Planet. Ha ha, keep on dreamin’ lil’ doggie, the chance of that happening is as fat as your cute lil’ high definition paunch!
Let me just take off my sardonic ‘We’re All Gonna Die’ hat for a minute and put on my serious ‘We’re All Gonna Die’ hat and say that it is imperative that we ask ourselves at this time the following:
Do we want cash back or LIFE back?
Do we want Economical savings or Ecological ones?
Do we want Amazon prime or do we want the friggin’ AMAZON back in its prime????!!!!
Making an endangered species list is a moot point. EVERY LIVING THING IS FUCKING ENDANGERED NOW. It would be easier to make a list of what is NOT endangered:
1) The bank accounts of the rich
2) Corporate Profits
3) Privatization
4) Capitalism’s powerful control over us
5) Endless fascination with Ben Affleck & J-Lo’s new old relationship (if you type B-E-N into google, the 6th autofill suggestion is Bennifer, right after Benadryl!)
There really is only one list worth making now and that’s a SHIT LIST, and it’s a short one….and everything on it coincidentally begins with an E! How funny!….
1) Extraction
2) Exploitation
3) Economy
4) Elon Musk
When oh when will we start crossing items off this list? WHEN?!
When Prairie Dogs are down to 0.001% of their historic population?
By then it will be too late. By then we will have entered into a new kind of survival, one that leaves no time for list making.
Hey, you know that feeling when you realize that your entire childhood was actually riddled with highly normalized acts of colonization and Imperialism and you didn’t know it because it was all downplayed or ignored or celebrated??? But now it’s like you’re on the lookout for all these white supremacy easter eggs! Like here’s one: the closest Mall my family shopped at when I was a kid was friggin’ named INDIAN MOUND MALL, located in Newark, Ohio…built near (and probably on) all these ceremonial mounds constructed by the Hopewell Culture hundreds and thousands of years ago. We thought nothing of it. NOTHING. But on a totally unrelated note, we sure thought the movie ‘Poltergeist’ was cool and 100% fictitious !
Nor did we think anything of a nearby private Golf course literally built on top of what is called the Octagon Earthworks, a 50 acre area with eight earth walls about 550 feet long and 5 to 6 feet high. This geometrically precise grouping of mounds has been linked to four moonrises and four moonsets in an 18-year cycle. As we speak, the ‘Moundbuilders Country Club’ (yes, that’s its name, because the name ‘Grave Dancers Country Club’ was already taken) is being sued by the Ohio History Connection, a nonprofit that has “owned” the full site since 1933. They are trying to assert eminent domain in order to buy back the Country Club’s lease on the mounds, which doesn’t expire for another 57 years. FIFTY SEVEN!?! Many Native cultures of these lands had philosophies that considered how their actions will impact future generations. Like the Iroquois Great Binding Law of Peace or ‘Gayaneshagowa’, that incorporated a Seven Generations principle, meaning whatever we do today will impact 7 generations from now so make it count. But all this stupid inane culture of ours can think of is preserving resource hungry sports for future generations of assholes. Side note: There was no “Iroquois” people, that was the name “given” to them by the French (as if they needed rescued from their own “savage” language). Iroquois roughly translates from French as “I have said”, because the French noticed that when these Natives were done speaking they acknowledged they were done because that’s how you do when you are polite and respectful and considerate AF. The Iroquois’s real name was ‘Haudenosaunee’, which means “people of the longhouse”.
So in January of 2020, a state appeals court ruled for Ohio History Connection but the Golf Club appealed it to the Ohio Supreme Court, where it’s still being decided. The descendants of those who built the mounds are not there to weigh in as they were all “relocated” during the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (Not to be confused with the Nature Removal Act of 2030 — enacted to prevent any future zoonotic viruses from hurting the economy). Natives didn’t just lose their homes, they lost part of their culture that arose from living with a particular land for so many generations. Ben Barnes, chief of the Shawnee Tribe said “The Removal Act also took away our place stories when the government forced us from Ohio to Oklahoma.”
But the owners of the country club say that any criticism of them is unfair because it fails to acknowledge that the club is ALSO historically connected to the area just like the mounds are. That logic checks out, because if we got rid of this golf course then how on Earth would we remember the histroy of how it was built on a sacred Indigenous ceremonial site?
In an article in the New York times recently, the club owners even said that they do respect and honor the mounds (that they let the public visit only 4 times a year). Hell, they even nick named the tallest mound ‘Big Cheif’, so get off their backs!
And then, not that long ago, whilst combing my upbringing for even more white supremacy easter eggs (although the more you find the more you realize they were all just hiding in plain sight! Like reading a ‘Where’s Waldo Book’ and realizing that Waldo is everywhere, he is playing all the characters!) I started thinking about how effed up Little House on the Prairie was for innocently romanticizng the fucking hell out of early settler colonialism land grabbing. Then I had a memory surface from the darkest corners of my subconscious. I vaguely recalled there being some kind of big explosion on one of the episodes. I looked it up, and it turns out that in the very last chapter of the TV series, the town, Walnut Grove, did indeed meet a rather dark end.
Turns out the land that Walnut Grove was built on did not actually belong to the townspeople, they were mislead into thinking it was theirs when they were used as human pawns during the rush to build homesteads on Indian Reservation land. But a nefarious railroad tycoon (who happens to be the same actor who plays the land developer in ‘Poltergeist’ who built homes over a graveyard without moving the bodies, just the headstones!) has just discovered that land has rich resources to be extracted (it’s never mentioned what resources exactly, only that it’s “better than iron ore”) so time for take backsies! The Tycoon tells Walnut Grove that they have to start paying him rent or leave.
Outraged townleaders go to see a lawyer in a neighboring town to go over their options. After reviewing the legal documents the lawyer tells them it’s all perfectly legal.
“So he can just come in and take it over?” asks one townie.
“Legally he has every right, morally he doesn’t. However the court will only concern itself with the legal aspects of the case” explains the lawyer.
“I can’t believe the law would be that unfair?” says Michael Landon’s hair.
Then the lawyer really delivers a zinger by replying….“Neither could the Indians who were originally given this land.” OUCH! But the Walnut Grovians show not a tinge of guilt over this truth bomb the lawyer just dropped. Instead they held strong to the Manifest Destiny belief….
“We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes, we have Native Americans but, candidly, there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”
Oh, I’m sorry, that wasn’t what the people of Walnut Grove said…..that is literally what Rick Santorum JUST FUCKING SAID the other day!
{Also, I just thought of a really good band name: ‘Manifest Destiny’s Child’. They would mostly cover Destiny’s Child songs but claim them as originals.}
“So there’s nothing we can do?” townie #1 asks the lawyer.
“Not legally, no. I don’t know what to tell you” concludes the lawyer.
Ummmm, how about telling them to give the land back to the Natives, OR maybe team up with the Natives to stop the tycoon!
But no, the townspeople instead tried their darn tootin-est to physically defend their town, but even with Michael Landon’s mighty coiffure in their arsenal, in the end the tycoon had the law and the military on his side. So the townspeople went full on “IF WE CAN’T HAVE IT THEN NOBODY CAN!!!” — an attitude that is the hallmark of the colonizer mind……
This is how colonization works, it’s like a virus, left unchecked it spreads and spreads, often turning the oppressed into oppressors themselves [*cough* Israel], turning victims into victimizers and then back to victims again, turning people against one another, turning people into their own worse enemy, turning off our innate empathy and replacing it with blind toxic tribalism.
How can we ever stop this cycle? We don’t know what the people of Walnut Grove did after they blew up their town, but they probably just left and went and colonized more land somewhere else, pushing more Natives onto more land deemed “worthless” until something of industrial value is found there, not learning ANY lessons from what just happened! I’m reminded of the poem by Martin Niemöller, a German Lutheran Pastor living in Nazi Germany. At first he supported Hitler’s regime. Actually, for quite awhile he supported what the Nazis were doing, but what he regretted the most was that once he came to see what was happening as evil he remained silent for some time. But eventually he did start outwardly opposing it and was then put in a concentration camp himself. He narrowly escaped execution and then devoted the rest of his life to anti-war campaigns.
First they came for the Lake Sturgeons, and I did not speak out — because I had never really heard of Lake Sturgeons until a humongoid one was caught in the Detroit River and it blew up on social media.
Then they came for the Prairie Dogs and I did not speak out — because I had no reason to believe they were in trouble because they were on TV looking perfectly fine.
Then they put children in cages at the border and I did not speak out because I was in a cage as well, one that makes me believe that when it’s my team doing the caging then there must be a good reason for it.
Then they bombed a school bus in Yemen, killing 41 children. Then they killed children in Palestine and I absolutely DID speak up this time — but I didn’t stop paying my taxes so the killing continued.
Then they came for those defending the last places where Nature can take refuge — Like the 2 men in Mexico protecting Monarch Butterfly habitat from expanding avocado plantations — but I LOVE avocado toast, so. Plus, it’s a “healthy fat”.
But they still have never come for me — funny, you’d think they would’ve by now, right? While I wait I’ll just keep paying my dues, paying my health insurance premiums, working down my debts, earning cash back points, so that when they do come for me they’ll see that I am very responsible, that I have value, and that my credit score is impeccable. And just to be safe I’ll go ahead and give them all my personal information now so when they do come for me they can easily find me, I don’t want a big struggle — like a Sturgeon thrashing and ripping thru fishing nets to escape, only to live in paranoid fear of the next time they come. What’s that?…they already had all my personal information and have been tracking my every move for years. Well, that’s a relief.
Then I got sick of waiting, so I came for them — but there was no them, there was nothing. No Lake Sturgeon. No Condors. Definitely no Monarch Butterflies. No Prairie Dogs. I had somehow missed all the funeral processions. And there was no one left to bury me.
