mountains and memory

Mountains & Memory

Everywhere I go now I devote some of my time to talking about Mountaintop Removal (MTR) as it is taking place now in the Appalachians in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. I do because I think there is no more egregious example of what an exploitative economy is willing to do to its own people and to nature in order to maximize profit. Few adults and children anywhere in this country --- except in the areas where this is happening --- have any idea about MTR. And even when they are told about it, they find it hard to believe. Which is not surprising. Who could imagine that a society would allow it to happen, or that even a group of powerful coal company executives could contemplate such a practice. The logical mind resists the logic of profit. Just as the logic of compassion has trouble understanding the logic of empire. But what makes MTR any different than any other exploitation of workers, children, nature, or the future? At least at some points in history companies who filled the water, the air, the earth with toxins could allow themselves, erroneously, to believe that nature would magically clean up after them. Rain, and rivers, deep holes and stiff winds would cover up the messes of the bad boys who ran away to count their money. But Don Blankenship of Massey Energy certainly does not pretend that nature will rebuild the mountains. In a more abstract, but equally real, way, no one should presume that our Constitutional democracy having been blown to smithereens by the previous administration will reclaim its integrity without serious accountability.

A few days ago I was talking in the Blue Hill Consolidated School in Blue Hill, Maine.
Every year the school has a theme under the enlightened leadership of the principal Fred Cole. This year it is citizenship. And on Making a Difference Day they invited me and the author Phillip Hoose to spend the day with the K through 8 kids. Phillip is the author of several books --- like We Were There, Too! --- about how young people have influenced history. And his most recent book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, tells the story of the 15 year old African-American Claudette who courageously refused, 9 months before Rosa Parks, to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her fate was much different than Rosa’s. The black community did not rally behind her, did not begin a boycott. In fact, they disowned her.
They were not ready. And she was largely forgotten. But it’s rare that an act of courage for justice goes totally unnoticed. As Phillip says, “She was Rosa Parks’ Rosa Parks.”

I had brought with me 8 portraits and told the students their stories. One was Judy Bonds, the inspiring MTR activist from West Virginia. Even with the youngest kids I tried to give them an idea of her struggle to save the mountains. I began by asking 80 five to seven year olds why the world was not flat, why there are mountains, where did they come from? There was a long pause. Finally one little boy said hesitantly, “Well, people carry around stuff, and they set it down, and finally it makes such a big pile, we call it a mountain.” A tiny girl said she was pretty sure that mountains were made by tornadoes --- “You know, they swirl up lots of rocks from all over the place and drop them all together.” Amusing. But are these ideas about the origins of mountains any more preposterous than continents sliding around the surface of the earth and crashing into each other. Eventually, several of the little kids suggested that volcanoes, earthquakes, and glaciers also made mountains. But no matter how mountains are formed, even these little guys --- many of whom think that things that go BOOM are cool --- could not imagine that adults would destroy the irreplaceable.

On another day I spoke in the Reeds Brook Middle school in Hampden, Maine, to a group of gifted and talented students. I met there a language arts teacher, Karyn Field,
who teaches a course on the holocaust and genocide. One of the books she assigns is the 1993 classic of young adult fiction by Lois Lowry, The Giver. I had never read it, so she gave me a copy.
This book is ostensibly set in some distant future in an engineered utopia where people see no color, have no music or art, make no free choices, agree to take pills that remove all sexual urges, have no historical memory, routinely practice euthanasia to control population and dissent, and have no deep feelings of joy or grief. The landscape is flat and featureless. A select group of women (“breeders”) bears all the children which are then raised in foster families. Disturbingly, the people are content and cheerful and that is enough because all their basic needs are taken care of. We are never told who the architects of this society are. We can only assume that these frighteningly logical social architects reasoned that human beings can only live in harmony with each other when relieved of all their exuberant senses and urges and their historical memory.
The hero of the book is a twelve year old boy, Jonas, who is chosen to become the next Receiver of Memory.
The society maintains one person who carries the burden of all memory of what human life used to be in all its sublimity and brutality, love and loneliness. All of his senses are intact. His function is to advise the community occasionally so that they don’t create a situation where people might feel something real. This person is now an old man, the Giver, whose job is to pass on his memory, through a kind of extrasensory laying on of hands, to his chosen successor, Jonas. The child chosen previous to Jonas to be the next Receiver of Memory chose suicide once she realized the historical extent of human suffering that she would have to carry.

I won’t tell any more of the book in case you may want to read it. And it is worth reading. No, more than worth reading. It’s important to read because the issues it raises about social control, the docility of most people in allowing themselves to be patronizingly controlled ( indeed, welcome it!), and the immense weight that anyone who truly allows himself/herself to feel the heights and depths of our exceedingly beautiful and cruel nature must bear.

Any good science fiction book is good because it uses the genre to explore through its metaphor something true about contemporary life. What Lois Lowry seems to have been interested in is the willingness of people to accept --- through a combination of internal and external forces --- a general flattening of their lives, a willingness to find comfort in being relieved of personal autonomy, eccentricity and imagination. The horror of this, this zombification, if you will, becomes banal and logical if your primary goal is order and contentment.
Much like the blowing up of the oldest and most beautiful mountains on earth is logical if your goal is profit.

I was also reading recently Alice Walker’s novel Now is The Time to Open Your Heart.
Her main character Kate journeys to the Amazon for a cleansing spiritual retreat and meets there a shaman, Armando. At one point Armando says this about contemporary western life:

“When you are caught up in the world you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else’s dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way, I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control…. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center. You would not drive a car looking out the side window, would you?”

What he is saying is that most “civilized” people have agreed to live inauthentic lives controlled by advertising, consumption, fear and the objectification of other peoples, never taking the time or being willing to make the effort to know themselves deeply. Choosing a kind of flat, faddish contentment over genuine integrity or community. It’s hard to say if such people have socially engineered themselves or been engineered by the powers that make profit from their predictable appetites. Takes two to tango. In any case, it’s not so different from the placid nightmare of Lois Lowry’s book. When a real nightmare seems placid, is drained of the awareness of its horror, is when the real trouble begins.

The effort of the Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait project, like the effort of any project that tries to tell a true history of courage, ideals, betrayal, suffering, triumph, defeat, justice, hypocrisy and hope, is to retain the honest memory. To resist the self-glorifying myth. To open the heart to feel the pain of victims and the love of the compassionate. To exult in the power of justice and to struggle against the logic of profit.