The War Was Never Over

http://www.nbcdfw.com/video/#!/news/local/Arlington-Police-Raid-Farm-Searching-for-Marijuana--Nothing-Found/219514061

NOTE: Some of my recent posts might not seem to have anything directly to do with animism. They are very much still on topic in a holistic sense. I cannot revere the living beings and spirits of this world and not take offense when they are desecrated. When human beings are persecuted for trying to live in a way in balance with nature, I cannot help but take offense at that too.

I was very surprised that there even is an ecovillage in the DFW area. A stronger bastion of conformity and the status quo can hardly be imagined than this place. I guess it goes to show that wild weeds can grow up even through the hardest concrete.

Okay, so on a flimsy pretext of a drug raid (no drugs were ever found), SWAT teams at the cost of tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars raided the Garden of Eden ecovillage in Arlington, Texas, waved machine guns at unarmed people, waved machine guns at mothers with infant children, and compelled the inhabitants under threats to destroy their own property, destroy the FOOD crops they were depending on for food in the coming year, destroy the ecological systems that they had in place and they seized tons of their property in the form of construction materials. The SWAT goons remained encamped on the property for TEN HOURS, long after they could have assured themselves that no pot was growing among the tomato plants. It was only tomato plants. Conveniently, Arlington Police used the raid on GofE's vegetable cartel to do some code enforcement as part of a long-running battle between the City and the inhabitants of the GofE.

Free country? It was never free. Talk to the Native Americans about how free the country was after the Man got here. The Man is still here, his nature hasn't changed, he's just become a bit more subtle. While I don't know if any of the inhabitants of the GofE are actually members of the First Nations, I don't think the comparison is far fetched. You violate people's rights, destroy their food and point guns at them because they aren't part of your civilization and don't want to be. Perhaps more to the point, they aren't domesticated. Towards the end of the Indian Wars, it wasn't the native people's existence that was seen as the issue. The government and citizens were on the whole prepared to let them keep existing. It was their lack of assimilation into white culture that was viewed as the problem. Their lack of domestication. It's not mainly a racial issue, had the original inhabitants of this continent been wearing white skin but practicing Native culture, I am willing to bet the same thing would have happened to them anyway. It's primarily an issue of control.

Settled peoples always had a terrible fear of the wild, that which was outside their control, not fenced in, couldn't be controlled or bribed or commanded. Or enslaved. The wild has always been the enemy of this civilization. It is still the enemy.

Lest someone think that the GofE was some sort of eyesore in the neighborhood, Google Maps shows that it is surrounded on one side by used car lots and auto salvage yards, and on the other side by some sort of rural airstrip. Compared to the auto yards, the GofE does look like Eden. Judge for yourself.

Auto Salvage Yards And Used Car Lots Next to GofE:

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Garden of Eden Ecovillage:

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It wasn't ultimately the code issues or some spurious idea of marijuana cultivation. Even if they had been growing marijuana, what kind of world do we live in where machine-gun toting thugs can run roughshod over your homes because of the kind of plants you grow? I don't smoke marijuana and have no intention to start, but putting people in prison because they are burning vegetables and inhaling the smoke is simply insane. 

It is a measure of how insane our world is that this is taken as a matter of course, that the Law can take away your freedom because of what plants you ingest.

They have always felt, instinctively, that plants are dangerous and suspect, and they are, because plant wisdom is not something they can control. It's wild wisdom. I don't currently smoke pot or munch peyote or eat mushrooms, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that plant wisdom is exceedingly threatening to the status quo. Ingesting the plants is just the tip of the iceberg, that's just an introduction and a how-do-you-do. "How do you do, I'm a plant, and I am about to change your world." It is not merely to avoid poisoning that mothers everywhere warn their children not to put strange plants in their mouths. Because only wild things eat wild things. Because if they do eat them, they might become wild themselves.

Ultimately the real issue behind the raid was disobedience, not being a good slave, dissent from the status quo, people being obstinately free. The City of Arlington must be held accountable for these violations of their human dignity. The war against the wild and the free didn't end when the Native Americans were robbed of their land and forced onto reservations. It continues today, with some new players, but same war. The plants and animals of this land have been feeling the brunt of the war from the day our imperialist culture arrived on these shores until today. The war was never over, it will never be over until that culture finally implodes from the accumulated burden its own evils.

This is the Eight Sign: You will see many youth, who wear their hair long like my people, come and join the tribal nations, to learn their ways and wisdom.

~Hopi Prophecy

Si Wa Wata Wa, an elder of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico, 1903