Read Online Resistance by Barry Lopez - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Barry Lopez
Tags: Fiction
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Against this blight I’d read biographies of Cardinal József Mindszenty and Gandhi and the South African poet Steve Biko and the Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet.
Strictly speaking, these horrors, through which people like Idi Amin and the Shah of Iran moved, Cuba’s Batista, Pablo Escobar’s thugs, and the likes of the Contras, with their allies in banking and business, their murderous ideologies, their paranoia and hatreds, were not my affair. I was an angry bystander. I’d no power to intervene, and had no intention of dropping the work I was already committed to, not in order to raise someone else’s awareness, promote greater indignation, or organize opposition. Besides, as soon as I pointed my finger at someone I knew I would flinch at the summariness of my accusation. I trusted no one with an assassination list. If I had learned one thing in the courtroom it was that corruption is never tidy. And that of all the crimes that harm society, aiding and abetting is the most insidious, the hardest to prosecute because it is so amorphous.
The world’s afflictions I still consider intractable. And who, among those we might agree were the true merchants of death, who among them, really, would ever say they had been wrong and desist, go pick up the water bucket and soap, offer no defense of their acts, just go for the bulldozer, the fire extinguisher, whatever was required?
I still keep in touch with old friends from college with whom I once passionately discussed these ideas, as if our task remained realistic and definable. We have skills, we tell each other now, we’ve opportunity, we’re reasonably well informed. We share strenuous objections to the way business and government have converged to reorganize society. Our solution so far has been to teach and apprentice, to convene opposing sides for discussion, and to circulate what government, business, and the militant religions have suppressed.
None among my friends has turned his back on the ideals of justice, which seemed so much more plausible when we were young. We’ve not lost faith; but for some the years have been very discouraging. Many of us can’t see beyond the boundaries of our own difficulties. We’re like a tribe of naked people caught suddenly in a freezing climate, men and women gathered in some sheltered hollow who have located a fire, and now spend their time in forays over a barren land scrounging for wood.
Beyond writing my briefs and arguing my cases, beyond reinforcing my friends’ plans and lifting their hopes, I don’t know what I am to do. What keeps me from giving up is seeing some young woman pull over to drag a dead animal off the road. Or meeting a reporter, as I just have, who has seen in the streets of Calcutta hundreds of the untended dead, curled up like leaves, who’s interviewed the sleepwalking miners of Rondônia, the warlords of Somalia, the mujahideen, the president of the World Bank, and then sits without comment while her father complains about the price of gasoline.
What holds me is the faith of the others. What has troubled me is the exhaustion that overtakes me, the way I want no longer to be responsible.
In the morning I could again recall no dream.
Virgil was sitting in the cottonwoods when I spotted him, and birds flew from the cover of their leaves as I approached. He had half a smile. I gave him a weighted nod, as if I had something important to say, despite my too-brief stay up the creek; but we saddled our horses without saying anything.
The plains grizzly I’d seen that night on the Hi-Line, the image of it, had been heavy on my mind as I walked back down the creek. It could easily have come up off the Fort Belknap Reservation. I asked Virgil whether he thought it was likely that a rare animal like that might be safer on Indian land. Some Indians, I knew, making their own difficult transition from that culture to this, were as likely to kill the bear as any wide-eyed white boy.
“The difference between
Strictly speaking, these horrors, through which people like Idi Amin and the Shah of Iran moved, Cuba’s Batista, Pablo Escobar’s thugs, and the likes of the Contras, with their allies in banking and business, their murderous ideologies, their paranoia and hatreds, were not my affair. I was an angry bystander. I’d no power to intervene, and had no intention of dropping the work I was already committed to, not in order to raise someone else’s awareness, promote greater indignation, or organize opposition. Besides, as soon as I pointed my finger at someone I knew I would flinch at the summariness of my accusation. I trusted no one with an assassination list. If I had learned one thing in the courtroom it was that corruption is never tidy. And that of all the crimes that harm society, aiding and abetting is the most insidious, the hardest to prosecute because it is so amorphous.
The world’s afflictions I still consider intractable. And who, among those we might agree were the true merchants of death, who among them, really, would ever say they had been wrong and desist, go pick up the water bucket and soap, offer no defense of their acts, just go for the bulldozer, the fire extinguisher, whatever was required?
I still keep in touch with old friends from college with whom I once passionately discussed these ideas, as if our task remained realistic and definable. We have skills, we tell each other now, we’ve opportunity, we’re reasonably well informed. We share strenuous objections to the way business and government have converged to reorganize society. Our solution so far has been to teach and apprentice, to convene opposing sides for discussion, and to circulate what government, business, and the militant religions have suppressed.
None among my friends has turned his back on the ideals of justice, which seemed so much more plausible when we were young. We’ve not lost faith; but for some the years have been very discouraging. Many of us can’t see beyond the boundaries of our own difficulties. We’re like a tribe of naked people caught suddenly in a freezing climate, men and women gathered in some sheltered hollow who have located a fire, and now spend their time in forays over a barren land scrounging for wood.
Beyond writing my briefs and arguing my cases, beyond reinforcing my friends’ plans and lifting their hopes, I don’t know what I am to do. What keeps me from giving up is seeing some young woman pull over to drag a dead animal off the road. Or meeting a reporter, as I just have, who has seen in the streets of Calcutta hundreds of the untended dead, curled up like leaves, who’s interviewed the sleepwalking miners of Rondônia, the warlords of Somalia, the mujahideen, the president of the World Bank, and then sits without comment while her father complains about the price of gasoline.
What holds me is the faith of the others. What has troubled me is the exhaustion that overtakes me, the way I want no longer to be responsible.
In the morning I could again recall no dream.
Virgil was sitting in the cottonwoods when I spotted him, and birds flew from the cover of their leaves as I approached. He had half a smile. I gave him a weighted nod, as if I had something important to say, despite my too-brief stay up the creek; but we saddled our horses without saying anything.
The plains grizzly I’d seen that night on the Hi-Line, the image of it, had been heavy on my mind as I walked back down the creek. It could easily have come up off the Fort Belknap Reservation. I asked Virgil whether he thought it was likely that a rare animal like that might be safer on Indian land. Some Indians, I knew, making their own difficult transition from that culture to this, were as likely to kill the bear as any wide-eyed white boy.
“The difference between
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