Free Endgame Vol.1 by Derrick Jensen Page B
Authors: Derrick Jensen
blue butterflies, Florida scrub jays, and the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse. 47 This may all seem like a lot of money, but in fiscal year 2001 the federal government spent more than $5.7 billion on the physical impossibility called the Ballistic Missile Defense System (a.k.a. Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, and most especially a.k.a. a black hole into which money disappears, to conveniently reappear on the ledgers of favored corporations). It spent $3.9 billion on new F-22 fighters, $3 billion on new C-17 Transport aircraft, $1.7 billion on new V-22 Osprey aircraft (which seem capable so far only of killing their own crews), $4 billion as a partial payment on a new aircraft carrier, $3 billion as a partial payment on a new submarine. Even prior to the events of September 11, the military received nearly one billion dollars per day during fiscal year 2001. 48 Just in the last seven years, the military spent more than $100 million on airline tickets it did not use. The tickets were fully refundable, but the military never bothered to ask for a refund. 49 The United States government spends $44 billion per year on spying. I used to often fantasize about using all that that money used for harm—real money, not the crumbs tossed in the direction of wildlife—to help salmon, spotted owls, Carson wandering skipper butterflies (listed as endangered only after having been reduced to a few individuals), Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits (of whom only fifty remain in the wild), Mississippi gopher frogs (of whom only one hundred members remain, breeding in one pond), Tumbling Creek cavesnails (down to forty individuals), and so many others. But the truth is that this will never happen.
The reason that my fantasies are nothing more than fantasies, and the reason that the same is true for Buckminster Fuller’s more well-known fantasies, is that the money must be spent on weaponry, and not on livingry. To believe the U.S. military does not serve an absolutely vital purpose is to have failed to pay any attention to the path of civilization for the past six thousand years. The importation of resources into cities has always required force, and always will. And that’s why Fuller’s fantasy is dangerous—as is my own, when I forget it is a fantasy—because it pretends that resource extraction can be accomplished without force and exploitation, thus diverting attention toward the outrageous and obscene military budgets and away from the social and technological processes that require them. If you need—or perceive yourself as needing—gold, wood, food, fur, land, or oil that resides in someone else’s community, and if this other community does not want to hand these resources over to you—and why on God’s green earth should they?—how are you going to get them? We have seen this process too many times to not know the answer.
In late 2001, the United States military began bombing the people and landscape of Afghanistan, at a cost to the American public of approximately a billion dollars a day, or about four dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country (or more was spent in three hours than in all of 1995 ostensibly to save salmon). This amounts to about forty dollars per day for every one of the human targets, that is, every Afghan man, woman, and child. Based on Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, forty dollars is about twenty times their average daily income. 50 It would, in a sense, be the equivalent of a government spending about eighteen hundred dollars per day per person in the United States to kill us here.
Much as I enjoy being the center of attention (I am, after all, a male), given the choice, I’d be willing to settle for a lot less attention were it given to me in the form of cash or foodstuffs, rather than bombs. No, thank you, I’d say politely, I don’t really want a bomb, nor even a “bomblet,” not even one as cool as a BLU-26 Sadeye, although I might be able to use a few of
The reason that my fantasies are nothing more than fantasies, and the reason that the same is true for Buckminster Fuller’s more well-known fantasies, is that the money must be spent on weaponry, and not on livingry. To believe the U.S. military does not serve an absolutely vital purpose is to have failed to pay any attention to the path of civilization for the past six thousand years. The importation of resources into cities has always required force, and always will. And that’s why Fuller’s fantasy is dangerous—as is my own, when I forget it is a fantasy—because it pretends that resource extraction can be accomplished without force and exploitation, thus diverting attention toward the outrageous and obscene military budgets and away from the social and technological processes that require them. If you need—or perceive yourself as needing—gold, wood, food, fur, land, or oil that resides in someone else’s community, and if this other community does not want to hand these resources over to you—and why on God’s green earth should they?—how are you going to get them? We have seen this process too many times to not know the answer.
In late 2001, the United States military began bombing the people and landscape of Afghanistan, at a cost to the American public of approximately a billion dollars a day, or about four dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country (or more was spent in three hours than in all of 1995 ostensibly to save salmon). This amounts to about forty dollars per day for every one of the human targets, that is, every Afghan man, woman, and child. Based on Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, forty dollars is about twenty times their average daily income. 50 It would, in a sense, be the equivalent of a government spending about eighteen hundred dollars per day per person in the United States to kill us here.
Much as I enjoy being the center of attention (I am, after all, a male), given the choice, I’d be willing to settle for a lot less attention were it given to me in the form of cash or foodstuffs, rather than bombs. No, thank you, I’d say politely, I don’t really want a bomb, nor even a “bomblet,” not even one as cool as a BLU-26 Sadeye, although I might be able to use a few of