By Lawrence Livermore – Anderson Valley Advertiser, May 30, 1990
Memorial Day, 1990, and the armchair patriots wax fulsome over the bones of a dozen generations of dead soldiers. Wealthy draft dodgers, now firmly ensconced in the seats of power, deliver lachrymose tributes to the slaughtered sons of the underclass.
“They gave their lives for freedom,” Vice President Quayle piously, shamelessly declaims. No; Dan, they had their lives stolen from them, snatched away and snuffed out to preserve corporate profits and to ensure lives of boundless privilege for idiot bastard children of the ruling class.
Patriotism has become a dirty word in America, used almost exclusively by hypocrites and fanatics to describe the mindless allegiance of a gullible citizenry to a state over which they no longer have the slightest bit of control. To love our country, we are told, we must unquestioningly follow any figurehead or psychotic installed as president, whether to invade foreign lands and butcher their inhabitants, to rape, gouge, and plunder the earth and sea and transform the resources gained thereby into a military industrial apparatus of obscene and unmanageable proportions, or to discard our constitutional freedoms in favor of turning the United States into one of the world’s largest and most technically advanced police states.
Under the circumstances, I would no sooner be called an American patriot than I would want to be a good German in the time of Adolf Hitler. Yet, for all its crimes against humanity, for all the self-righteous mayhem it has visited on the poor, the weak, and the helpless, America has also produced its share of great men and women. They have recognized that freedom is not a commodity to be hoarded by a privileged few, but the birthright of all living things. They have realized that, unlike gold, whose value is enhanced by scarcity, freedom attains its true worth only when it’s universally shared
True patriots—and I use the word advisedly, because its derivation implies loyalty to the obsolete, nationalistic notion of “fatherland”—are usually without honor in their own time. Many of them suffer violent deaths or are condemned to spend much of their lives in prison. Eventually they may be immortalized by a statue in the park or a postage stamp-sized picture; in the history books. But while they are still with us in the flesh, true patriots are more likely to be viewed as troublemakers, rabble-rousers, dangerous disturbers of the status quo.
Though nearly everything they do is clearly motivated by a passionate love for this land, I would hesitate to call Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney “patriots”. Perhaps “matriots”, if there is such a word, would be the better choice, because their first loyalty is to the planet that is the mother of us all, rather than to archaic, artificial notions of country. But whatever we call them, they represent much of what is best in the human spirit: Courage, resoluteness, understanding, compassion, and, above all, love; these are the qualities that distinguish nearly everything Judi and Darryl do.
Today, Memorial Day, 1990, while millions gorge themselves on beer and hot dogs, while ghetto streets echo with the gunfire of another weekend’s drug wars, while a couple centuries’ worth of fossil fuel is consumed in an orgy of auto races and frenetic freeway meanderings, while aged power mongers pour their obscene, oily rhetoric over the graves of the forever young, we can find two real American heroes in, respectively, a hospital bed and a jail cell.
Those of us who know Judi and Darryl personally will no doubt one day be able to impress our children or grandchildren with that fact. I have seen young people look at me with a bit of awe when I mention that I once heard Martin Luther King speak, or that I once talked to John Lennon on the telephone, or that I participated in the blockade of the Pentagon in 1967. Yet Martin Luther King was constantly in and out of jail, John Lennon was reviled as a worthless, irreverent drug addict, and the young people who faced down clubs, bayonets, and tear gas at the Pentagon were widely considered traitors of the worst sort. History has judged all of these people far more kindly than their contemporaries did, and rightly so.
I think also of the civil rights movement and the original Mississippi Summer, when I was still a teenager. I remember watching helplessly the images of peaceful marchers being beaten bloody, of hysterical parents at the bombed-out church where their children had just been murdered, of the college students and the Detroit housewife who headed south to seek justice and disappeared into unmarked backwoods graves. Above all, I remember the smirking southern sheriffs refusing to do a thing about it, blaming the victims, claiming that “None of this would have happened if they hadn’t come down here stirring up trouble.”
An idealistic kid with my head pumped full of eleventh-grade civics, I was horrified. Where was justice? where was this American way I’d been learning about? Like millions of others, I cheered when the President sent federal marshals, troops and the FBI into the fray. Years later we would learn that the FBI had, in many cases, cooperated with, or at least tolerated, the racist brutality endemic in the south that at the time it seemed that at least something was being done, that there were those in authority to whom the Constitution, the Bill of Rights; and the Declaration of Independence actually meant something.
Cut to 1990, and the civil rights movement is no longer about voting rights, lunch counters, or drinking fountains, but about the right of all of us to breathe clean air, drink pure water, and to raise our children in a world that has at least a chance of surviving humanity’s often malefic impact. When the bomb exploded in Judi and Darryl’s car my first reaction was “Thank God it didn’t happen in Mendocino County.”
For Mendocino County today is hardly different from the Mississippi of 1964. The government, and particularly the District Attorney’s office, is completely corrupt, and local police and sheriff’s deputies function primarily as private security forces for the handful of corporations who are destroying our land and reducing our people to the status of a Third World peasantry. At least, I thought, since the bombing occurred in the relatively liberal Bay Area, a real investigation might be done, and the pathetic individual responsible for the bombing might be captured before doing further harm.
But I was wrong. There would be no investigation; instead the FBI, with the cooperation of the Oakland Police, seized upon this tragic event as an opportunity to mount an all-out attack on Earth First! and Redwood Summer. The victims—and even some of the witnesses—were turned into criminals. And while federal agents spent hours wrecking houses belonging to Judi, Darryl, and the Seeds of Peace organization, the real bomber or bombers had all the time in the world to make a clean getaway.
Many of us even began to have sneaking suspicions that perhaps the bombing wasn’t the work of some misguided person incited by corporate hate mongers at Louisiana-Pacific, Maxxam, and County government, but by the FBI itself (Anna Sparks, a hideous kept woman for the north coast timber industry, who incidentally serves as a Humboldt County Supervisor, chortled that many folks hereabouts were satisfied that Judi and Darryl had gotten “what they’d brought on themselves.”).
We don’t like to think of possibilities like that; while we know the secret police in other countries quite commonly assassinate their own citizens, and that the FBI has been strongly implicated in similar activities here in the United States. It’s kind of terrifying to realize that the government can do anything it wants to you, and that no one except your friends, if you’re fortunate enough to have some, will lift a finger to help you.
Happily, Judi and Darryl are rich in friends, and thousands more who never knew them have rallied to their support. They will come through this ordeal stronger than ever, and their cause, which is nothing less than saving the planet from extinction, will be immeasurably strengthened as well. Redwood Summer is now a household word, and it’s hard not to hope that the next few months will mark a major turning point, not only in stopping the slaughter of our forest on the north coast, but in awakening the consciousness of people all over the planet to what must be done if we wish to survive as a species and a biosystem.
When the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting first let its paramilitary forces into the Emerald Triangle, self-styled “Commander” Jack Beecham proclaimed that CAMP’s mission was not only to eradicate marijuana, but “to recapture territory for the United States.” He recognized correctly that parts of northern California were no longer under the control of the federal government.
But I am here to tell you today that you will never recapture this territory. We are the sons and daughters of America, but today your sons and daughters are beyond your command. We belong to the earth now, to all the planet, and your silly countries are as meaningless to us now as are the ideologies of greed, and hatred that have wreaked so much havoc on this tortured land.
Your bombs and guns, your prisons and torture chambers have never stopped—only delayed—the cause of freedom. Human beings have committed innumerable crimes against each other and against all life, but again and again they have redeemed themselves by learning from their errors and trying to set things right.
That’s what Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney are about, and they are far from alone. Judi and Darryl, I salute you, and I thank you, too, for your inspiration and example. If the rest of us can spare even a fraction of the time and energy you’ve already given, this struggle will be well on its way to being won. I’ll see you in the forest.