The Response-Ability to Resist – Determining Why and When – by Jesse Wolf Hardin
The following is Wolf’s most recent teachings regarding personal defense and social resistance, the nature of violence and importance of informed response. As he’s written elsewhere: “In the natural world, ecosystem health is not a product of peaceful acceptance but effort and contest, made stronger by the tension in such dynamic balance, with no single individual or species able to maintain an upper hand over the rest. For us humans, that resistance is not just about standing up for ourselves and our love ones, but for freedom, diversity and justice. And not just against an individual attacking us, but any system, ruler or government impinging on what we know matters most.” Hear him clearly: his case is not so much for purposeful confrontation, as essential as that at times may be, but rather, against “victimhood, acquiescence and inaction.” This is no manifesto spelling out how things should be, but a set of questions for us each to answer as we determine for ourselves why and when to act… and consider the price of doing nothing.
The Response-Ability to Resist
Determining Why and When to Fight Back
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
www.animacenter.org
I am no proponent of confrontation and wolfviolence, I’m a proponent of wholeness and balance, diversity and life, freedom and compassion, nature and truth. But in the process of holding to such values, I have not only felt it necessary to physically repel attacks, but also to protest injustice and impede destruction, and to intervene in situations where I wasn’t even sure I could make a difference. I have done such out of a realization that we now teach in Animá: that we are responsible not only for what we do, but also in part for any results that arise from or personal and collective failure to act.
I’ve heard it said that confrontation or violence is only justifiable or practical in immediate defense of one’s home and family, and never against an idea. And that we become no different from the aggressors if we forcefully resist them. Such points would seem to lead to some rather essential questions, one’s that nobody can answer for us.
Let’s start with the first point, using the most exaggerated example for the sake of clarity. If we knew there were a band of murderous men, once abused as children but now sworn to the idea that raping and killing young kids is not only acceptable but somehow righteous, who were going from neighborhood to neighborhood doing the most horrendous things to the girls there, would you stay home rather than confront the acts this idea fed? Second question: what if their path and direction would soon take them to your own neighborhood, would you wait until they were at your very doorstep to intervene, or postpone any attempt at action until you had personally and in the moment failed to talk them out of torturing your daughter? At what point does inaction, whether in defense of children or of the community, the forests we depend on, the threatened plants and animals with no constituency, voice or defense of their own?
On the other hand, perhaps like me you could justify taking offensive action before the raiders got to your town or block, striking their camp at night before any more atrocities could be perpetrated? In that case we have to ask if you would take such definitive action even if the raiders were heading to attack a town in a different direction, or if they were committing their depredations in another country, against people we will never meet? And there is the matter of degrees as well as emotional or physical distance. Would you stand up to forcefully prevent a girl from being emotionally abused, or only physically? To protect a boy as quickly as a girl? An adult as much as a child? A stranger as well as a family member? A pet we are promised to, or wild creature we might never see with our own eyes? Then what confrontation over the pollution of a water source that the children as well as ourselves depend upon? Raising hell over the depleting and poisoning of the soil we cannot exist without? You might stand up for a plant that you use for herbal medicine or a food-bearing fruit tree your grandmother once tended, but what about those wondrous species with no known human use, whose beautiful flowers you may never lay eyes on?
And then there is the matter of fighting against acts but not ideas. In general it sounds good, since so much personal injustice has been committed as part of attacks on religious and cultural ideas, from the imprisonment of outspoken revolutionaries to the violence that drove the Puritans from England to America. We must ask ourselves, was the time to confront Nazism when they were gassing thousands of scape-goated jews and gypsies, or when the idea of an all powerful elite was first foisted? If we could justify confronting or forcefully obstructing the abuse of children or the ecosystem, to what degree might we also be willing to confront people or institutions teaching, promoting or even imposing a dogma where abuse is held to be justifiable or even laudable? Can an idea, by virtue of the multiple evil acts or climate of oppression it engenders, be more harmful and in need of our active opposition than a single instance of a person being physically attacked?
When using activism or even violence for some end, we may indeed be in some danger of emulating the destroyers, of becoming like them… but only if we are detached and lack a clear ethos as to both what is acceptable and what is intolerable, what we would risk death for, but also what we live for. Only with the above questions asked, and more, can we hope to have the kind of personal ethos and code that can make us effective as well as responsible co-creators instead of victims of this world and life.
(Those wishing assistance with the creation of a code of honor that reflects your values and beliefs, can benefit from enrollment in the Animá Orientation Correspondence Course)
(Please copy, post and forward freely…)
Categories: Jesse Wolf Hardin – Essays & Tales, Practicing Animá Lifeways
