Geocide, Truth, and Retribution
As a general rule, I don’t believe in retributive justice or the death penalty. Human beings are more than their worst acts, and while I’ve long since left the dogma of my Christian childhood behind, I still embrace the truth of the John Bradford’s aphorism, “There, but for the Grace of God, go I.”
In religious constructs, I have sinned and I am a sinner. I have also broken the laws and remain a law breaker. While I strive to never cause harm, harm has been the result of many of my acts, and in a world based on retribution, I would merit the stones hurled. As such, I generally believe that justice should be meted out with a light touch from an enlightened hand. I don’t support excessive prison sentences, even for violent crimes. Rather, I would like to see a carceral system sparsely used, humanely run, and based on the precepts of rehabilitation, fairness, and love.
But then there are some crimes that just cry out for the hammer. I remember feeling that way in the late 1990s with the inhumanly barbaric dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. I remember feeling that way again later the same year when Matthew Shepard was tortured, beaten, tied to a pole and set on fire. I didn’t want those debased cretins given any light. I wanted them tried, found guilty, and put in the darkest hole humans could conceive to construct and I wanted it known that that is how a self-respecting community treats those who feel they can lynch and brutalize our neighbors.
I also recognize that the bestial spirits which rise in my heart when I think of those crimes are best left outside of the law. I would not have been a neutral juror on either of those cases. I could not have separated my rage from my reason. I remember wrestling with those contending interests in my heart at the time, and coming to recognize, somewhat sadly, that there are times when I deeply desire retribution for the sake of doing violence to one who has harmed an innocent.
Thankfully, I don’t feel that way often. I say thankfully because I really dislike the headspace of desiring vengeance. It is poisonous to the soul. But over the past several days, that feeling has come back to me again. This time, however, it is not for a crime committed against one vulnerable, beautiful human body that has me wanting to rain Old Testament Gehenna on the perpetrators. Rather, it is the scenes growing out of the recent Amazonian armageddon.
The scope and size of the damage is truly terrifying, with over 90,000 fires currently burning, spread across over half of Brazil. The idea that tonight there are people living in those forests, watching their entire cosmos go up in smoke, is just soul crushing. But then I read that tens of thousands of these fires have been set intentionally, by agribusiness at the behest and with the encouragement of the President Jair Bolsonaro government.
Bolsonaro is a sebaceous moral cyst of a man. During the campaign, he told people to call him Captain Chainsaw, and he has celebrated the exploitation of the rainforest by business interests in the most offensive of ways, comparing the Amazon to a virgin that Brazilians should “possess” before losing her to “foreign perverts.”
And his pleas evidently fell on welcoming ears. Agribusiness, farmers, and ranchers now getting the indication from the top of government that the era of regulation, socialism, and environmentalism had gone by the wayside, literally went out and started setting the lungs of the planet ablaze. And they are doing it, explicitly, to make a profit. Once the forest is gone, they get a few years of crops and then burn some more. It is violent madness, but there you go. In the Chicago Business School, the White House, and on Wall Street, they call that “Progress.”
I think about those people with torches in the forest, and I want them to suffer. I want them to become trapped inside the inferno where they will burn to death and by so doing will see, too late, that they’ve sealed not OUR fate, but their own. I want Jair Bolsonaro to be tied up in a straightjacket and pitched out the door of a helicopter and into the flames. I want the CEOs of McDonald’s and Burger King and every other multinational to suffer the same fate. I want Charles Koch to chase his brother David to hell. I want Donald Trump and his coterie of EPA-destroying, free-market-fellating sychphants to be sent to die on the disappearing Antarctic Ice Sheet. I’m absolutely enraged and I don’t know what to do about it.
There are people, locatable people, who are actively committing Geocide, and making a fortune in the process. And no matter what they say, they KNOW what they are doing. I simply no longer believe that climate-change deniers actually mistrust the science. It’s as clear as goddamned day. Rather, I think they use that supposed skepticism as camouflage for the deeply held cynicism underneath. They know what they are doing, but they just don’t fucking care. The ability for the planet to sustain life in any way recognizable to our 21st century eyes doesn’t fit on the ledger, so fuck it. Burn it down, blow it up, drag it down the highway and watch it’s body parts get ripped off of the chain; tie it to a fence post and ram bottles into its holes, before setting it on fire to cover your escape.
Fuck you. Fuck each and every one of you who is making a living off killing our world.
And I know I can’t do a damned thing about it but scream. And I know that I’m part of the consumerist cycle of a Stage IV metastatic capitalist system that grinds the good earth to pulp. And I know that none of this matters and that Jair Bolsonaro and Charles Koch and Donald Trump and the rest of them will probably never see the inside of the jail cell that they so richly deserve, but a boy can hope and dream.
And so here’s my dream and hope:
I hope that someday soon people start taking the idea of Geocide Trials seriously. I know it won’t happen today, or this year, or this decade. But I want people to start to discuss it. I want them to use the term. I want all of us to pay attention to who is defending the regime of marauders. I want the biographies of those committing the crimes. I want all of us to start taking notes, collecting remembrances, and preparing to one day name names.
That is my dream, because maybe if we start to talk about it enough now, they will start to get scared, and we will start to find our revolutionary strength. Maybe they will realize soon that there will come a time in the not too distant future when all their fucking money and all their bullshit excuses can no longer protect them from the righteous rage of our collective, deeply retributive justice.
I want these criminals up against the wall someday. And I want them to see it coming. I want them scared. I want them to feel their impending doom in exact measure to how they are making the rest of us feel this very day. They are killing us all. They are murdering us, torturing us, defiling us.
That can’t go unpunished. Not in a just and sustainable world.
I want retribution.
