There is so much to be angry about. My mother shovels snow to the stench of shit because a factory farm has been setting up shop within sight of the home where she raised me. After describing her dilemma, she announced that she just paid her taxes, taxes my representatives have sent to the Israeli military so that they would have enough bombs to kill hundreds of Gazans. Even the virtual world is not immune to the devastation. A friend informs me that pictures of the Palestinian dead are cropping up in his social networking site. Then he goes on to tell me about other pictures being taken from the sky above Appalachia. The pictures are of coal ash, a poisonous by-product of coal burning. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s power plants store their ash in huge containment ponds. As with any system that relies on dirty energy, tragedy will happen. On Dec 22nd one of those ponds burst , spilling 1 Billion gallons of nastiness into tributaries of the Tennessee River. I view the aerial photos showing a lake of toxicity washing over people’s homes. It reminds me of the tons of cow shit generated by that factory farm now embedded on the landscape where I used to watch sunsets. Mother says the manure gets piled on a hill to fester, and, during a heavy rain, it will wash right over to the neighbor’s playground. There is a lot be be angry about.
There is a lot to be angry about, especially if, like me, you live by a coal plant, and when you hear the trains making their deliveries of fossil fuel, you wonder how many mountains were leveled to make today’s heating bill possible.
There’s a lot to be angry about it, if, like me, you drove a lot this week and had to wonder, while stopping at the gas station, about this bizarre and deadly exchange the U.S. has with the middle east. Send in the guns. Distribute to dictators, terrorists, and armies of occupation. Remove the oil. And if petroleum oil wasn’t bad enough, now there is palm oil. It comes from palm trees that are usually grown on tropical lands that were once rain forest, until they were converted by fire. Now palm oil, the fruits of this scorched earth agrisprawl, has infiltrated thousands of products in just about every American supermarket. Grrrrr!!! Feeling that every meal contains rain forest destruction is enough to drive a person crazy.
But not for me; not today. Today I devoured a bowl of manoomin, wild rice grown by the Anishanabee people. They grow it north of where I live. They have grown it before, during and after American colonial genocide, and their defiant food traditions have been keeping alive possibilities of liberation. Plant and resist. Harvest and resist. Eat and resist. When I eat manoomin I ingest some ancient strength. The rice mingles with the rage that lives in my belly, and that digestive marriage produces something new, a productive anger, a call to action, transformation. I go for a walk, mail some protest letters, compose some e-mails & make further plans for turning my seething rage into focused intent. I intend to keep organizing. Organizing is an act of love.
