Free A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen Page A

something I was not to do again for many years, until I was a junior in high school and a puppy died in my arms. My tears that cold day were not from sorrow, something I dared not feel for fear the sorrow would never end, but instead the tears came from resolve. I had seen—I had felt—the damage that my father's anger could do. I had told my mother that I couldn't say "I love you" because those were words my father often repeated—like a mantra—after he beat someone. So I resolved that cold day in fifth grade to never again feel anger, to never again feel anything. I was well prepared for school.
    The monotony of our culture's genocidal impulse extends not only across space, but also through time; the God of our culture has always been jealous, and whether going by the name of God the Father, Yahweh, Jesus Christ, Civilization, Capitalism, Science, Technology, Profit, or Progress, He has never been less than eagerto destroy all those He cannot control.
     
    TheOld Testament seems at times little more than a glorification of this genocide. I open to Numbers, and read, "If thou Wilt Indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroytheir cities." I turn a few pages and read again, "And the Lord our God delivered him [Sihon] before us; and we smote him,and his sons, and all his people." A few pages later: "And when theLord thy God shall deliver them before thee: thou shalt smite them; and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. ..." It never stops. Follow the rise of civilization, and necessarily you follow the outwardpath of an expanding circle of death, from the destruction of the barbarians of northern Greece to the rape of the Sabines, from the eradication of Europe's indigenous peoples to theenslavement of Africans, from the conquest of the New World to theintentional introduction of syphilis to the Pacific Islands. The story is the same. The murder of men, women, and children. Think for a moment about the toddler shot in the aftermath of Sand Creek—"Let me try the son of a bitch. I can hit him." Multiply this child by a million, and place him in the once-forestedhills of the Middle East, the once-forested hills of northern Greece, the once-forested hills of north Africa, place him anywhere on the globe, and you will see him being murdered to serveour God: "Some Christians encounter an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mother's arms and flung it still living to the dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mother's eyes."
    One more example among millions: "At about 1:00 p.m., the soldiers began to fire at the women inside the small church. The majority did not die there, but were separated from their children, taken to their homes in groups, and killed, the majority apparently with machetes....
    Then they returned to kill the children, whom they had left crying and screaming by themselves,without their mothers.... The soldiers cut open the children's stom achs with knives or they grabbed the children's little legs and smashed their heads with heavy sticks." This last example occurred in the 1980s. Troops equipped and trained with UnitedStates assistance took part in a systematic program that killed 10,000 people a year in Guatemala, and intentionally dispossessed more than 1,000,000 of that country's 4,000,000 Indians.
    Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. Every day I tell myself I should continue to write. Yet I'm not always convinced I'm making the right decision. I've written books and I've been an activist. At the same time I know neither a lack of words nor a lack of activism kills salmon here in the Northwest. It is the presence of dams.
    Anyone who lives in this region and who knows anything about salmon knows the dams must go. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows the dams will