Free A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen Page B

probably stay. Scientists study, politicians and businesspeople lie and delay, bureaucrats hold sham public hearings, activists write letters and press releases, I write books and articles, and still the salmon die. It's a cozy relationship for all of us but the salmon.
    I don't like it. I do not wish to merely describe the horrors that characterize our culture; I want to stop them. Sometimes it seems to me terribly self-indulgent to write, to shuffle magnetically-charged particles on a hard drive, when day after day it's business as usual. Other times it seems even worse, as if the flow of words were not merely self-indulgent, but an act of avoidance. I could be blowing up dams. I could be destroying the equipment used to deforest our planet. I could be physically stopping perpetrators of abuse. How many social critics, I often wonder, how many writers, really want to stop the cycle, bring down this culture of death? How many have found a way to make a comfortable living while comforting themselves with beautiful descriptions of nature and the occasional outburst of righteous indignation?
    The world is drowning in a sea of words, and I add to the deluge, then hope that I can sleep that night, secure in the knowledge that I have "done my part." Sometimes I don't know how we all live with ourselves. What can I say that will give sufficient honor to the dead, the extirpated, the beaten, the raped, the little children—"I can hit the son of a bitch. Let me try him"? I don't know.
    In the ten minutes I have stared at this computer screen, try ing to fashion a conclusion to this section, more than sixty women havebeen beaten by their partners, and twelve children have beenkilled or injured by their parents or guardians. At least one species of plant or animal has been permanently eradicated from theface of Earth, and approximately a square mile of the planet hasbeen deforested. In the time it took me to write this last sentence, another woman was beaten by her lover.
    My mother has often stated she wishes my father were dead. This seems reasonable to me, not only because of the pain he causedher and her children, but also because it would stop at its sourcethe rolling wave of pain he leaves in his wake.
    My own wish for him would be that he live in the full understanding of the damage he has caused. Better minds than my ownhave pointed out that this is the psychic meaning underlying the Christian notion of Hell. Remove Hell from its literal interpretation, which trivializes the profound psychic content in order to create yet one more means to control people ("Give up your land-based religion and accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior or you'll roast in hell"), and what remains is precisely what those like my father—those who would destroy— lack, which is an honest appreciation of their actions. Another way to say this is that for someone who is destructive, for someone who is controlling, for someone who is civilized (and in more general terms, for anyone), Hell is the too-late realization that everything and everyone are interdependent. This realization is our only salvation.
    Today I am in an airplane. As often happens when I fly, I am thinking about death. As we pass over waves, mottled and un-moving at this distance, or tiny specks of houses, house upon house in straight rows or loops that curve in patterns predictably similar from city to city, I sometimes picture—when the plane drops or skips from turbulence—the craft breaking up, or a wing tearing off, or an engine disappear. Then I picture the plane falling. I wonder how I would spend those last moments, and I perform anew the calculations to reveal how much time I would have before I hit the ground. Let's say we're at 32,000 feet. Dis tance equals half the acceleration times time squared. Acceleration equals thirty-two feet per second per second. Time squared equals two thousand. The square root of two thousand is about forty-five. Forty-five seconds to