State of Fear

Are you afraid, someone asked me in the past couple of days after reading these blog entries. Of course I'm afraid--and I will delve into the reasons for my fear later in this post, but right now I want to go back to the Michael Crichton book my Uncle Herman mentioned to me earlier this week, as I know a little bit more about it now.

The book is called State of Fear. Its premise is that people in positions of power use fear to keep their suboordinates in line. I won't disagree with that. I see this everyday, even in simple situations like your average job, where the boss has to keep her workers in line by fear. I'm sure there are people who enjoy their jobs, but even if you do, you'll have to admit there are sometimes you just don't want to do what the boss wants you to, and that you have internalized an invisible line you know you can't cross without getting fired. If you're afraid you'll lose your job if you don't do what the boss wants you to, then you are being controlled, part of a hierarchical system that sees your needs as suboordinate to the needs of the workplace. Sometimes this isn't so difficult to tolerate, but sometimes it is, if you find yourself doing something that violates your ethics, or even just your spirit, that wants the freedom to express itself more creatively. I have definitely internalized this fear of authority in the workplace, and this fear has kept me from becoming who I feel I am meant to be. I have fit myself into many boxes that weren't me because I am/was afraid that I wouldn't be able to support myself, or ashamed that I couldn't, also afraid of being judged by people who I loved who fully believe that the hierarchical system of organization is ok.

I don't want to judge those who believe in our governing system, although I'll admit that my own experience of being judged, which has made me feel unloved, has led me into counter-attacks in which I do make judgments. My brother pointed this out in a reply to one of my blogs where he felt I was being condescending towards drunks, and I am glad he did so. By holding up a mirror for me, he was able to make me look at why I was dismissing people who drink--because I was a drunk too. By condemning drunks, I was feeding the shame I felt about being an alcoholic, and was able to see that I have not fully forgiven myself for what I perceive, on one level, as a weakness. By attacking others, I attack a part of myself I don't feel good about. I have many judgmental thoughts all day long. It is very hard not to, because I think these thoughts come to us to teach us lessons about ourselves. They are messages from our psyche that point out what we are afraid of. They are the places where we need to heal by accepting ourselves. In my case, this is often a fear that people won't like me--which on a deeper level is a fear of love, or the lack of it. Yes, my greatest fear is love. If you feel like you want to write back to me right now about what I should do to get over this fear, go ahead. I want to have a mirror held up so I can see my face reflected in your pupils. I only ask that you in turn hold the mirror up to your face and see what your desire to tell me what to do says about your own fears. The more I do this, the more I am able to see how connected everything is--which helps me let go of feelings of separation. This is a diary. I am doing my best not to hide my faults from you because I want us all to see these connections. My imperfections are a string I can follow back to the source of my fear, by showing them to you, I hope to give you the opportunity to do the same.

In the meantime, we have Michael Crichton writing about the state of fear--although I'm puzzled about his use of the double entendre in the word state, because in his book of the same name he seems to be working in collusion with the state to create the very fear he claims to be dissecting. State of Fear is about a group of eco-terrorists who create natural disasters in order to terrify the public that global warming is happening, when scientific evidence proves that it is a hoax. Although he claims this is a novel, he states that the footnotes to the book are based on actual scientific studies, so he is obviously deeply invested in his fictive opinions. The motive of the fear-creators in his novel is to raise money for his fictive environmental organization, who supposedly doesn't care anymore about the environment,but has become corrupted like any other organization with power.

Why Crichton would pick an environmental organization instead of our government, who is using the war on terrorism to do this in such a blatant way, doesn't just make me outraged, it makes me question his intentions to such an extent that I wonder if he got kickbacks from Cointelpro (yes they do still exist--the FBI's counterintelligence program). A couple of times since I got back from earth activist training people have joked to me "so what have you been up to lately besides eco-terrorism?" I laughed it off, because I knew it was meant as a good-natured joke, but after reading the review of the Crichton book I started wondering who came up with the word ecoterrorist in the first place. I am aware that there are some people who have vandalized property in the name of the environment, but I am not aware of anyone who has been blown up an entire building of innocent people in the name of forest defense, or hijacked a plane. By using the word terrorist to describe these acts of vandalism, the right is equating them with the people who have perpetrated these atrocious acts. As far as I know, far more activists are dedicated to non-violent means of resistance, because they are aware that if they adopt the methods of the oppressor, then they will ultimately become like the oppressor. I remember when political correctness was all the furor, and I'll admit that a lot of the new ways used to describe people were/are funny (meaning awkward, meaning what we really feel is uncomfortable with ourselves)-- but at the heart of the movement was a genuine desire to find words that enabled people to break free from labels that degraded or limited them in some way. The campaign by the conservative right to lampoon political correctness was an attempt to defuse the potential for people to break out of their assigned boxes. We may think it's funny, but it's a genuine threat to the powers that be. Therefore, I take offense to the word ecoterrorist. I'm not mad at the person who called me this, who is genuinely good-hearted, it just makes me realize how organized and intelligent and organized the right is in their campaign to discredit the environmental movement that they can make something so offensive seem like an innocent humorous comment, and when I follow this reaction, I rejoice, because it shows how afraid they are of us in the first place.

So afraid that they are the ones employing terrorist methods. Some of you may be aware of the case of Judi Bari and Darryl Cheney, two Earth First! activists involved in forest defense in California. On May 24, 1990, in Oakland, CA, a bomb exploded in their car. Cheney was injured, but Bari almost died. When she woke up in the hospital after the explosion, doctors told her she would never walk again. (She is now able to walk again.) She also found out the FBI was accusing her of blowing herself up--that she was transporting a bomb that was going to be used in an act of ecoterrorism by Earth First! The charges were dropped due to lack of evidence, but Bari pursued a case against her accusers in which she was able to prove that the FBI had actually planted the bomb in her car in order to discredit her and her cause. The FBI are the terrorists here, not Judi Bari and Darryl Cheney. Bari and Cheney had received numerouns death threats which the FBI did not investigate. Bari was also able to uncover that the FBI agents assigned to her case had links to COINTELPRO and the Big Timber interests who were opposed to her. For those of you who don't know, COINTELPRO, was the organization assigned to take down The Black Panthers and The American Indian Movement. The FBI claimed the branch was defunct, but Bari and Cheney were able to prove that COINTELPRO was assigned to take down Earth First! as well. And guess what? She won a 4.4 million dollar case agains the FBI, which in my eyes, proves that the checks and balances written into the Constitution, in some cases, are still working.

Why was the FBI afraid of folksinger Judi Bari? Why did they feel the need to brand her an ecoterrorist? I find it astonishing that there are people who care about money so much that they would be willing to chop down old growth redwood trees, but maybe they've never walked among them. Maybe they're afraid of what lives in the forest. Lions and tigers and bears, right?If there is one thing we humans have proved during our tenure on earth so far, is that we are extremely creative, so creative that we have managed to completely dominate our environment--not the environment. Ours, because it is something we share with every plant, animal, rock, piece of garbage, and nuclear warhead, on the earth. If we stopped calling it the and started calling it our maybe we would strop trying to dominate it! Again, choice of words is so important. I catch myself choosing the wrong words so many times every day, and am glad to have the opportunity to get feedback from people on this blog as if points out to me how imprecise my thinking is so often, and how I must never assume that people know what I am thinking when I have been sloppy or vague.

It is my belief that the people who control our country, and the people in control in many countries around the earth (who come together under the auspices of the World Trade Organization) don't want us to realizes is that we are not just extremely creative, we are infinitely creative, and because of that we have nothing to fear. If we don't cut those forests down people will starve they say, and that might be the case if humans don't use their creative powers to create a world in which no one goes hungry for lack of money. These fear-mongers are giving us an incredible opportunity--by standing up for the earth we open the door to uncovering our fears, and theirs as well. They are giving us the opportunity to recognize that we create the reality we live in. If we choose fear, we will live in a world defined by lack, if we choose to believe that there is enough for everyone, our world will reflect this back to us. Remember, the monster in the middle of the Labyrinth is afraid too. When you make it to the center offer to let him hold onto your string and lead him out. Like the spider, everything we need is inside of us. Every choice we make, every thought, every judgment, effects the web that we weave. What word do you want woven in the center of your web?