Cities Burn, Max Hikes
Monday, June 1st, 2020: Black Range, Hikes, Sawyers, Southwest New Mexico.
Is denial a river in Egypt?
We depend on news media for information about the world outside our neighborhoods. But news media are businesses within the capitalist consumer economy. News media reflect the dominant worldview of our society. The information they deliver is driven by their business agenda and prioritized by the dominant values of society – the values of elites: Eurocentrism, anthropocentrism, individualism, statism, imperialism, competition, etc.
This is okay with most of us, because we share that dominant worldview and we accept those dominant values. It’s what we were taught in the schools.
But is our worldview accurate? What might it be leaving out?
What about our history? Do we absorb the news in context of our history as brutal conquerors and enslavers? Do we assume that the past is past, problems are solved and errors forgiven? The Native Americans whose land our ancestors stole, upon whom they perpetrated genocide – all that’s in the past, we Anglos are the natives now. The fact that our great cities sit on the land of indigenous people and our children are consuming their resources – that’s just the way things are, you can’t turn back the clock. Besides, Native Americans weren’t that great – scientists say they drove Pleistocene megafauna to extinction. Anyone defending them is just naively romanticizing the noble savage, and this land is better off in our hands.
Lincoln freed the slaves, the civil rights movement of the 60s ended segregation, one day a year we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. – shouldn’t that be good enough?
In the media worldview, we live in a democracy, so when people seem to threaten that, we call them fascists. But how many of us are really aware that the U.S. maintains a worldwide military empire, with over 600 bases in foreign countries on every continent, and we’re actually still at war in Afghanistan? We don’t get to vote on any aspect of our military or how it is used, so from the point of view of our warriors and their victims, the argument of fascism vs. democracy is largely irrelevant – in a military sense, the U.S. is not a peaceful democracy, it’s truly a violent empire.
Nor do we get to vote on the U.S. economic and industrial empire, or on the implementation of new technologies that determine our future. A billionaire like Elon Musk can surround the Earth with tens of thousands of satellites, disrupting the entire planet’s night sky, without any public dialog, and without even making the news headlines. No wonder we’re so often shocked by the news – our main source of information leaves us clueless.
We have a justice system – everyone has the right to a trial by a jury of his or her peers. Really? How many of us are aware that local prosecutors actually decide the fate of the accused in most cases, single-handedly imposing punishment on people whose guilt is never proven? As our prison populations spiral out of control, are we aware of restorative alternatives to punishment and incarceration which were developed and successfully implemented by societies we’ve conquered and replaced?
Come on Max, be realistic. We have to deal with things as they are.
Sure, our society has problems. But they can all be solved by electing the right president, and implementing the right technologies. Space exploration will solve everything – as we know from Star Trek and Star Wars, in space all races can live together in harmony. Earth is obviously the source of all our problems. Screw the Earth – let’s colonize Mars! After all, colonialism has worked well for us Europeans so far. Our generation may have screwed things up, but our kids will do it right.
My generation, the generation that came of age in the 60s, was supposedly enlightened. Funny how as they aged, they gravitated toward more and more affluent, whites-only jobs and neighborhoods. Choosing a community of peers, they ended up in bubbles surrounded by like-minded people, unaware of how others were living, thinking, or feeling. Their kids went to private schools – one of them even chose a college formerly known as “White-Man College” for its near-complete lack of minority students. My friends seldom considered that they were helping to make our society more segregated than ever. As a result, their families are doing great – they’re completely isolated from people of color and poor neighborhoods. But that’s okay, because they have their trusted national media to keep them well informed.
So they believe in progress, and unless the news tells them otherwise, they think everything’s fine in the world. No conflict, no segregation, no discrimination, no poverty, no frustration, no suffering. My generation even elected a Black president! Sure, he was a half-white lawyer from the suburbs, not a son of poverty from the ghetto, but it was progress, anyway, right? That’s the important thing, we’re moving forward, away from that past where we made all those mistakes.
In the rural Midwest, I grew up with Black classmates, and I went to college amid the vast Black ghettos of Chicago’s South Side. Unlike many of my friends, as an artist and musician needing cheap studio space, I lived in dangerous slums and barrios among poor Blacks and Latinos most of my adult life, where I had Black colleagues, bandmates, friends, and roommates. My old hometown of Oakland prides itself on some of the most successfully integrated neighborhoods in the world, but much of it is also segregated, with a history of racism and racial violence. My current hometown in the rural Southwest has only a handful of Black folks, but unlike almost all of my friends, I live now in an integrated, relatively egalitarian community, in a neighborhood that’s half Latino.
In poor ethnic neighborhoods of West Coast cities, I’ve had police helicopters and SWAT teams surround my house multiple times. I was falsely arrested and spent a night in a jail cell with poor Blacks and Latinos. The cops have seldom helped me and often hurt me, and I reject all our institutions of “justice” and “law enforcement” as simply the destructive, coercive mechanisms of social control employed by the imperialist ruling class.
But I’m not immune from denial. It took two years of hard work to recover from my chronic foot injury, and another 18 months to build to my current level of fitness. Yet after my foot started to hurt again on Saturday, and I swore to take a break from hiking, I got up on Sunday and went out for a hike anyway.
I rationalized it because when I got up, my foot no longer hurt. And it felt fine for most of my hike. I hadn’t forgotten yesterday’s pain – I planned to take it easier than usual. This meant hiking closer to 10 miles rather than 15, and keeping my elevation gain closer to 3,000′ rather than 4,000′.
I was targeting the southern segment of the crest trail that normally takes me north to a 10,000′ peak. This southern segment sees less traffic, and those who hike it usually only go as far as the 9,600′ southern peak, which is 3-1/2 miles one-way. I figured I’d try the trail past the peak, although it traverses the heart of the 2013 wildfire burn area and there was no information on whether it’d been cleared of logs.
As it turned out, nobody else uses the trail beyond the peak. It’s unmaintained and abandoned. It’s overgrown and blocked by deadfall and blowdown, and the farther you go, the less evidence there is that a trail ever existed. I managed to get about a mile and a half beyond the peak, fixing landmarks in my mind and cutting arrows in the dirt to help me find the way back, before I gave up and turned back. But at least I was able to get a view of the southern part of the range as it trails off and subsides into the low desert.
This part of the mountains lies outside the protected wilderness area, and I’d seen old cowpies along the trail from the start. In fact, the abandoned segment beyond the peak is now used only by cattle. I glimpsed a lone bull in the forest above me when I sidetracked off the trail to climb the peak. And on the way back, I passed three cows grazing in lush grass at 9,000′ on a steep forested slope below the trail.
The New Mexico locust whose dangerous thorns I’d been contending with in other high-elevation burn scars were now blooming, and I’d been informed by a local botanist friend that the flowers were edible, so I sampled some and found them pretty good, with just enough sweetness on top of the sour base. Hopefully they’ll hold their blooms until the wild strawberries are ready and I can combine them.
It wasn’t until the last mile that my foot began to hurt, and when it did, it was so bad I couldn’t put weight on the ball of my foot and had to limp the rest of the way to the vehicle. There, I examined a historical plaque that explains the name of this high pass.
Like our news media, the sign leaves out most of the story. Lt. Emory was part of the Army of the West. This army was an early agent of the imperialism in which our white, Eurocentric society has replaced native peoples. The story is far too complex for most of us to keep in mind – first the Spanish came and conquered the Indians of the Western Hemisphere, then they established European colonies, then we Anglo-Americans conquered parts of their colonies along with what natives were left. And now we consider ourselves natives. What’s past is done, right?
Another aspect of the complexity we deny is that science accompanies our violent conquests – Emory represented science in the Army of the West, and we credit the scientific discovery of this place to that violent conquest. We deny how these things go hand in hand. No pleasant urban neighborhoods with their galleries, theaters, pubs and nightclubs, coffeehouses and bookstores, without the militarized police and the hidden military empire, without the violent conquests, the capitalist oppression, the consumerist exploitation of distant rural communities and habitats.
But you probably know by now what I see. I see that our society is perpetually in a state of collapse. Our cities are parasitic enclaves grafted unsustainably onto land stolen from indigenous peoples. Our police, our military, our presidents will fight their way to their own demise, and good riddance.
