Fans of my infamous “Hope Sucks” post from back in May will be interested to learn that the environmental activist I referenced, Derrick Jensen, is still absorbing the significance of the insight. This quotation comes from an interview of Jensen at InfoShop which I never would have seen, except for Hecate (go visit, I recommend the blog).
There’s this fear that if I recognise how bad things are then I’ll just die. Well no. There’s even a better thing that happens. When you recognise how bad things are, it does kill you and there’s a wonderful thing about being dead and that’s once your dead they can’t touch you any more. They can’t touch you with threats, they can’t touch you with promises . . . . The point is that once that rage and sorrow really started to crystallize and once it started to go through me like I said, it killed me. The “me” it killed wasn’t the animal me, wasn’t the human me. The “me” it killed was the socially created me. What emerged was someone who no longer relies on hope and someone who is simply an animal who is going to defend those I love.
I wonder how many of us really grasp this. Sometimes I think I do. But it’s so easy to slip back into old patterns. The collective constantly tries to resurrect the “socially created me” he talks about having killed. It’s like we’re all our own zombies. Who knows what would happen if we just pulled the fucking plug on all of ‘em?
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