Happy Birthday, Ed
Happy Birthday, you grumpy, inspiring, enviro-meddling bastard.
With every year that passes, it seems as if we need you even more. You’d say “bullshit,” of course, and say we don’t need you. All we need to do is get up off our fat asses and do something ourselves.
I agree. Yes, we’re pretty much failures. We tried (half ass effort…at least for some of us), but we didn’t get it done. We’ve let corporations take over damn near everything. Washington and Wall Street have merged. “Green” might as well have its own stock symbol. The pestiferous capitalist killing machine has expanded.
And we’re now terrorists. We used to be monkeywrenchers or saboteurs, but we allowed the powerbrokers to up the ante, take control of words and their meanings, the press, our schools our freedom. And as of last week, we allowed ourselves to be plunged directly into fascism by a bunch of old white guys wearing black robes. We have private police, private prisons and greedy profiteers sucking the life right out of everything.
But what could we have done? What would you do? I reckon about all we can do is retreat into small enclaves, protect what we can, take care of one another and prepare the survivors to emerge from the ashes and rebuild The Land of the Free. Be like medieval monks, inscribing the whole sordid tale to paper in the hope someone intelligent will find it and take heed.
I haven’t given up hope for The Great Uprising, and I’d happy risk it all to be part of it. I’m going to die anyway. Might as well die doing something interesting and not end up in a corporate hospital with tubes hanging out of every orifice. I dream of millions marching on Washington and taking it back for the people. Throwing out the interlopers of freedom and replacing them with a federation of cooperative bioregions. Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, a dream, but sometimes a dream is all that keeps you going. It’s all that keeps you from throwing in the towel, running to the hills and cowering in a cabin like Ted Kaczynski.
That, and my family and my friends. I’m here for them, human and non-human, and will happily fight on to protect them from the aforementioned enemy.
ONWARD
Jack Burns