Ever since I and Matt started an “Anarchist Spirituality“ forum on LiveJournal a little over a week ago, I’ve been trying to get clearer on what specifically are the things that bother me about secular or “non-spiritual” radical political culture.
And yesterday I got a magazine in the mail (Bite Back #11) that has given me something concrete to work with.
There’s an editorial by an activist who was arrested at a demonstration, and is currently in jail. The issue here is animal rights activism, which I’m sure not all of you are personally invested in. But it could be almost any activist, talking about any struggle.
“HLS [a notorious animal testing lab] is conspiracy to murder, on a vast unimaginable scale. 70,000 animals trapped inside there; 500 animals killed a day. Just numbers until you stand outside those gates as I did in the weeks before being sent to jail, and then as you see the murderers driving out, laughing at their crimes, you feel pure evil, tangible; you see it in the workers faces, you feel the millions of animals they have coldly callously murdered crying out for justice, and you feel the animals trapped inside HLS calling out for freedom.It was my privilege to demonstrate at HLS with a 16-year-old activist from Italy, and to stand beside her as she screamed in pure rage and hatred at the murderers driving home, with tears pouring down her face at the horror of it all.
We all need to feel that rage, we all need to feel that anger and we all need to act on it.“
Feeling “pure rage and hatred” for another person? Seeing “pure evil” in their face?
Language that clear and strong isn’t exactly commonplace, to be sure, but I think this attitude is prevalent in radical circles, just in more or less muted forms.
I know this makes sense at a certain level: I hate whatever hurts those I love. And I hesitate to tell anyone who feels this way, about whoever, in whatever struggle, that they’re somehow “wrong.” But almost everything in me says “No” to de-personalizing anyone in this way, for any reason.
Which is a lot of what draws me back to reading the words of Jesus, the Buddha, George Fox and other spiritual figures, despite being an ex-Christian nontheist.
The issue for me then becomes, how, without anger or hate, do I actively and energetically resist oppression? How do I love both the oppressor and oppressed, but without compromise?
Originally posted (in slightly different form) to Anarchist Spirituality.
