The Moon is down but not out

“You destroyed the law when you came in, and a new law took it’s place. Don’t you know that?”

“It’s always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.” — John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down

“I’m beyond tired. I’m beyond scared. I’m standing on the mouth of hell and it’s going to swallow me whole… and it will choke on me.” — Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I’m feeling bent and warped by an angry sort of grief. But I have a muddy sort of light to share with you this week.

I read John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down this morning.

He wrote it to embolden the occupied people’s of Europe during the German occupation. It was printed in stealth and distributed amongst the people at great risk to themselves and it feuled a resistance. It was translated into dozens of languages and distributed all across the occupied nations. In Mussolini’s Italy, being seen with a copy of this book was a crime punishable by death. That’s how terrifying this 100 page book was to those in power.

It was steadying to read. Britain’s occupation of India ended in 1947. Only 77 years ago. My grandma was a young girl then.

Their disasterous handling of Pakistan and Punjab resulted in a horribly bloody struggle after they left. My family lost quite a bit of farm land and people to the struggle. That is about the same time the British divvied up Gaza and Isreal. The reverberations of the violence of these occupations still echo loudly for the scattered peoples of Britain’s ex-colonies.

Many different efforts drove the British out. There were many bloody resistances that loosened the lid of the jar, but the ones everyone remembers most were Ghandi’s hunger strikes and civil disobedience campaigns. Ghandi is who inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s peace marches in America. Little do most westerners know, Ghandi had a wife, Kasturba, and she taught Ghandi about civil disobedience. She was jailed several times before Ghandi caught on and realized he couldn’t win against the British without the women as they were the back bone of society. As trampled on as they were.

What sealed the deal on Britain’s exist from India was actually financial. They were bankrupted by the two wars they had just fought and needed to unload the burden of having to take care of a rebellious colony across an ocean.

It’s funny how finances are often the determining factor above any sort of moral obligation or responsibility.

It was during and after the wars that America’s industrial machine, primed for war time production, sank it’s gears deeper into everyday civilian life.

The seed oils that were used for lubricating machines and weapons began to be used in shelf stable food product and for cooking because it was cheap and abundant. Even though it is linked with heart disease and inflammation in the brain.

The small sustainable family farm that fostered stewardship of the land and community togetherness was obliterated by factory farms where we put millions of animals through gulag type situations for an apetite for cheap fast foods with no concience of their sourcing or methods used to produce them.

The DDT that was also a product of war was sprayed on the fields and people indiscrimantly to reduce pests until Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. We became alienated from the earth and her creatures. And we poisoned our selves in the process.

War time propaganda began to be used on the civilian population of our own country to convince people to buy based on desire rather than need. Foods and products became more addicting. Corporations gorged themselves on the spoils of their own homeland, swollen like ticks, managed by maniacs with egos the size of mountains and instead of breaking up their power, like we would have once done under Teddy Roosevelt, we worshipped them.

We became a culture obsessed with personal desires and image. A bottomless pit of consumption. A perpetual war machine that is digesting itself.

We became invaders of our selves.

But this is actually a positive in some ways. If we are the problem, we can also be the solution. Systems can be re-made. It’s not easy, but it is possible. And I will hold on to the possible like death.