JessieShires.com

The intersection of modern life and the sapiens of this particular Homo is a place of increasing tension. Right action is becoming increasingly difficulty to suss out. The more I learn about the roots of every product I consume, the more I see my small part of the Big Problem we’re in.

Every time I flip a light switch, I’m reminded of what’s being done to the place of my birth, the mountains that are the home of my heart.

I grew up in a rural area of southwestern Virginia, in a county that missed out on the dubious fortune of having riches of coal beneath its soil. But the mountains I love, the mountains that are in my skin and bone and blood, are but one part of a great body of earth–a body I love as much as my own–and that body is being torn apart by the greed of our kind.

I don’t believe in hell, but there are special kinds of evil that make me understand why some people invented such a place. The creators of landmines, which lie in the ground to maim and kill long after the fleeting conflict is over, have committed one such evil. Likewise the inventors and perpetrators of genetically modified seeds, child sexual tourism, and the CAFO.

Those who practice mountaintop removal are also in that handbasket.

What possesses a person to visit a rain of destruction on a place solely for the sake of making money? How did we come to value a printed piece of paper over the abundance of life before us? What perversity of spirit leads us to believe that we have the right to obliterate a mountain that Nature took millions of years to make, just so we can power our teevees and hair dryers and microwave ovens?

The ignorance and evil I see around me–and my complicity in it, willful or accidental–makes me want to crawl under a rock or Bo tree or guillotine. But neither escape nor transcendence nor penance will put us any closer to Making Things Right.

First, open your eyes. Atrocities are being committed in your name. I know you never asked to be part of the Rape of Appalachia. Even the humblest among us must power our refrigerators, and, while we can choose among fifty types of toilet paper, most of us can’t choose where our power company gets its power. This is but one of many savage perversities we have inherited.

Neither you nor I will repair this situation, though I will admit to grandiose, flaming-sword-of-justice fantasies from time to time. So what’s a thinking person to do, in the face of such wrong behavior?

Turn off yer goddamn teevee, for one (and the benefits of that one act are more far-reaching than you can imagine). Unplug it, for good measure. Reduce your own complicity, then take up the flaming sword of your pen, and support folks like the ones here, whether with checks or blog posts or spreading the gospel, old-timey style.

After that, it’s up to you. Community art project? Guerrilla neighborhood works? Meditating for peace? Feed your neighbor, crochet scarves for the homeless, teach someone to read. These seem like such tiny splinters of protest to wield against powers that can level mountains, but without a steady trickle of water we wouldn’t have the Grand Canyon.