If we do not shake off our lethargy, our anomie, and resist, 
our misery, despondency and feelings of helplessness will mount. 
We will become paralyzed. 
Resistance, especially given the bleakness before us, is about more than winning. 
It is about a life of meaning. It is about empowerment. It is a public declaration 
that we will no longer live according to the dominant lie. 
It is a message to the elites: YOU DO NOT OWN US. 
It is about defending our dignity, agency and self-respect. 
The more we free ourselves from the bondage of fear 
to throw up barriers along the forced march toward ecocide 
the more we will be enveloped by a strange kind of euphoria, 
one I often felt as a war correspondent documenting horrific suffering and atrocities 
to shame the killers. We obliterate despair in our acts of defiance, 
even if our victories are Pyrrhic. We reach out to those around us. 
Courage is contagious. It is the spark that ignites mass revolt. 
And we should, even if we fail, at least choose how we will die. 
Resistance is the only action left that will allow us to remain psychologically whole. 
And it is the only action left that has any hope of halting the wholesale extinction 
of the human race, not to mention most other species.

chris hedges:extinction rebellion:truthout


i've been reading chris hedges for some time and i feel something strange, like it becomes rhetorical either because it's too late and we are doomed or because things will somehow work out. i feel the same about michael ruppert and noam chomsky. chomsky shows so little emotion though. then ruppert, well he's gone, but he and hedges show passion, and deep hurt. the feeling though that either way you have to make yourself sustainable in an unsustainable system, which seems impossible, yet is, for a while, and we only live a while anyway, in the best of circumstance. this may be the worst, but it's been the worst more often than not for a long, long time, except for pockets of paradise in spacetime. art may be the one refuge now though, the only agency, not the art of commodity, but of life affirming resistance and persistence, the anti-capital, the free exchange, the energy beyond control, the ordinary that gets quashed, that rises repeatedly, the art of life that given the rudiments of living, never quite dies.