Meanwhile, every eighteen seconds a man beats a woman, every three minutes a man rapes a woman, and every day two men will murder women. And that's just in the United States.
Lierre KeithFor those of us who can't be active on the front lines - and this will be most of us - our job is to create a culture that will encourage and promote political resistance. The main tasks will be loyalty and material support.
Lierre KeithThese political passions are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual. Or they were for me, and they still are. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. If the martial imagery alienates you, I can rephrase it. I want my lifemy bodyto be the place where the earth is cherished not devoured, where the sadist is granted no quarter, where the violence stops.
Lierre KeithUnderstand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.
Lierre KeithIf we took 75% of the world’s trashed rangeland, we could restore it from agriculture back to functioning prairies — with their animal cohorts — in under fifteen years. We could further sequester all of the carbon that has been released since the beginning of the industrial age. So I find that a hopeful thing because, frankly, we just have to get out of the way. Nature will do the work for us. This planet wants to be grassland and forest. It does not want to be an agricultural mono-crop.
Lierre KeithResistance is a simple concept: power, unjust and immoral, is confronted and dismantled. The powerful are denied their right to hurt the less powerful. Domination is replaced by equity in a shift or substitution of institutions. That shift eventually forms new human relationships, both personally and across society.
Lierre KeithOne group of people that get a lot of PTSD are soldiers who have been in combat. You know who gets more PTSD, has higher rates of PTSD? Women who have escaped prostitution. That tells me that the war that men wage against women is actually worse than the wars they wage against each other.
Lierre KeithPeople sometimes say that we will know feminism has done its job when half the CEOs are women. That’s not feminism; to quote Catharine MacKinnon, it’s liberalism applied to women. Feminism will have won not when a few women get an equal piece of the oppression pie, served up in our sisters’ sweat, but when all dominating hierarchies - including economic ones - are dismantled.
Lierre KeithWhat’s looming in the shadows of our ignorance and denial is a critique of civilization itself.
Lierre KeithDo we want to feel better or do we want to be effective? Are we sentimentalists or are we warriors?
Lierre KeithWhat is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
Lierre KeithI think the biggest reason otherwise radical people don't want to face the necessity of ending industrial civilization is privilege. We're the ones reaping the benefits. We've sold out the rest of life on earth for convenience, creature comforts, and cheap consumer goods, and it's appalling. I'm sickened by this bargain.
Lierre KeithIt’s time to put away our fairytales, all of them, and assume our responsibilities, the adult responsibilities that begin with adult knowledge. Our planet needs us. She needs us to think like healers and act like warriors. And if you think that’s a contradiction, then get out of the way.
Lierre Keith