The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  Silence intensified throughout the room.

  “So what you’re proposing is?” Joseph asked.

  “Nonviolent resistance.”

  “Something like that seems indicated,” Salal said. “Given that success in violent resistance seems beyond our means.”

  “How does it work?” a young woman from the Forest Communities asked.

  “Like the king of Denmark,” Maya said. The faces around her looked puzzled. “Don’t they teach you history? In World War Two, when the Nazis took over most of Europe, they issued a proclamation that all Jews had to wear a yellow star on their clothing. It was the first step toward rounding them up and sending them to the ovens. And most countries collaborated. But in Denmark, the day after the law was proclaimed, the king rode out wearing a yellow star, and so did everybody else. Their Jews survived.”

  “But how would it work here?” someone else asked.

  Maya answered. “Suppose that nobody in the city obeys the invaders, or helps them, or gives them information? Suppose all we say to the soldiers when they come, is: There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us’?”

  “Complete noncooperation?” Greta asked.

  “I’m not a Gandhian,” Maya said. “I’ve worked in nonviolent movements all my life, but I’ve never believed in the spiritual benefits of self-immolation. To be honest, I don’t know if this will work. In part it depends on the enemy we’re facing, and how ruthless they’re willing to be.”

  Bird stood again. He had been arguing this with Maya all week, and he was still unsure whether he would come around to agreeing with her. “They are ruthless.” He spoke slowly, signing his own words as he went, as if deliberately to display his broken hands. “I’ve been up against some of them, and frankly I can’t envision them transforming, even under the influence of our sweet characters. But there is this. Of those first five thousand, at least forty-five hundred are going to be black, brown, yellow, red, or some combination, mixed with just plain poor. And they’re in the army because they come out of a world you can’t even imagine—I can hardly imagine it myself, even though I was locked up in it for ten years—where the color of your skin determines everything about you; where if you don’t have money, not only don’t you eat, you don’t drink. These guys, they may never have seen free-running water. They’re going to come marching in here, and it’s going to look like paradise on earth to them.

  “So it just might work. Some of them might welcome an invitation to come over. But not all. If we do this, some of us are going to die. Some of us are going to be hurt, imprisoned, beaten, tortured.”

  “And if we fight?” Lily asked.

  “We would be fighting—just in a different way,” Nita said.

  “If we fight them with guns?” Lily went on. She spoke from her seat, quietly, yet her voice carried across the room and rang with authority. “Aren’t some of us going to die, be imprisoned, tortured, then? Aren’t we just forgoing the satisfaction of taking a few of them along with us?”

  “Don’t knock that satisfaction,” Bird said. “It’s real.”

  “Real it may be,” Lily said, “but it is an indulgence we cannot afford. Because what is on trial here is not just us. We stand on the ridgeline of the future, the great divide determining whether or not what we have built can survive.”

  “It will survive if we have the guts to defend it,” said Cress of the Water Council, rising and pushing back the red bandanna that bound his dark hair. He glared defiantly at Lily, taking in Bird also with a hostile glance and looking, Maya thought, like an old poster of Che Guevara that had hung in the grease-spattered kitchen she’d shared with Rio in the sixties.

  Mierda, Bird thought, not Cress. Lily was right, we should have talked to him privately first. But Bird had resisted the idea. He remembered Cress from a decade back, when his name had been Carlos and he had shown such talent on the guitar that the Musicians’ Guild had offered him membership. He’d declined and joined the Water Council.

  “Why?” Bird had asked, meeting him in the market a few days later. “You’re good, hombre.”

  “Because music is a luxury. Water is a necessity.”

  “Music is more than a luxury. We all know what happens to a society that doesn’t value music and art and dance.”

  “We all know what happens to a society that doesn’t protect its own survival!” Carlos/Cress had turned to stare coldly into Bird’s eyes. “Or maybe you don’t. I do. I was born in Fresno. I know what it’s like when the temperature climbs up above a hundred and ten degrees, day after day, and the crops bake and die, and there’s less and less every week to eat. My folks didn’t want to leave, like most did, so they hung on until the quake of ’27. By then we’d pumped so much water out of the aquifers that the land fell in on the empty water table when the tremblor hit. Every standing structure fell. My baby sister and I were buried under our house, pinned by the roof beams. I can still hear her voice, calling for water, getting weaker and weaker until she died.”

  Bird had opened his mouth to say something, but Carlos went on without giving him a chance to speak.

  “Three days later my dad dug us out. My brothers were dead, my mother was dead, but the two of us survived. We headed out for the Bay, unlike most of the misled fuckers who believed the Millennialists about the hotbed of Satan worship here. They headed for the Oregon border, or south to the labor camps of LA, where I’m sure the Stewards picked their bones if they didn’t die on the road. But we walked here. It took us three weeks, in the heat, rationing every damn drop of water. Believe me, we weren’t singing any songs. We weren’t worrying about music.”

  Bird had laid a sympathetic hand on Carlos’s shoulder, but he shrugged it off and pulled away abruptly, walking off with only a curt goodbye.

  He told me more than he intended, Bird thought now, opened more than he meant to, and so he hated me, because I couldn’t truly meet him then, when I was what? Eighteen? How could I have matched the authority of his suffering? Not then.

  But now? Now he hates me because in the arena of competitive suffering, I have an edge.

  “Our guts are not in question here,” Lily said. “If courage were all we needed, we would not be worried. But wars are not fought just with guts, or even with weapons. They are struggles of consciousness.”

  A TRUE REVOLUTIONARY IS MOTIVATED BY GREAT FEELINGS OF LOVE. That was what the poster of Che had said, Maya remembered.

  “Consciousness moves to a rhythm,” Lily went on. “It follows a beat, you could say. When disparate consciousnesses meet, they become more alike, just as two clocks beating to different rhythms set down next to each other will entrain.”

  “What does that mean to us?” Cress asked.

  “It means the invaders, coming into proximity with us, will become more like us in spite of themselves.”

  “But doesn’t it also mean that we will become more like them?” Bird asked, although he hated to appear to be on Cress’s side. And hasn’t it already happened to me, ten years in that place, so that I no longer really fit here?

  “That is the question we must face and the art that we must develop,” Lily answered. “The art of remaining who we truly are. If we can hold on to what we are, then even our enemies must change.”

  “You’re asking for miracles,” Cress complained.

  “Only a miracle can save us. And who will make miracles for us if not ourselves?”

  “We need tools to make miracles with. We need weapons, and we still have some time. What if we were to start production immediately, round the clock, gift work from everyone?” the woman sitting next to Cress suggested.

  “We don’t have the metal, our factories aren’t tooled for weapons production, and there is no possible way that in a few weeks, or even a few years, we can equal the destructive capacities of a society that has made weapons their top priority for generations,” said a woman in the plain garb of the tecchies.

  “And if we defend ourselve
s in the old ways, with force,” Lily said, “we will revert to the old ways of thinking and doing things, and lose what we’ve built.”

  “I’m not willing to lie back and let the Stewards run all over me,” Cress said. “I’m not willing to let them destroy what we have here. Water Council is in consensus about this. We will fight and die, if need be, to protect the waters.”

  “Fighting is all very well,” Lily said, “but winning is more to the point.”

  “We will win, or die trying.”

  “More likely,” someone called from the back of the room.

  “That’s it,” Lily said. “What good does it do to die trying, if you lose in the end? The result—for the waters, for the salmon, for the trees, for the people—will be just the same.”

  “What good does it do to give up and not try at all?” Cress countered. “At least we would have a chance, however slim.”

  “We’re not talking about giving up,” Greta said. “We’re talking about a different way of fighting.”

  “Fight fire with fire!” yelled one of the Wild Boar People.

  “And burn down the whole watershed!” another voice called out.

  “Quiet, please!” Salal shouted. “We have a process here, let’s stick to it. Lily, you have the floor.”

  “Cress, I sympathize with the strength of your commitment,” Lily said. “But you don’t understand what is at stake here.”

  “The hell I don’t. Don’t patronize me!”

  “Forgive me, I should have put it differently. We of Defense Council see this struggle as more than a question of whether or not the Stewards can take over here. Crucial as that question is, something even broader is at stake. Greta put it well when she said that this dilemma has faced every peaceful culture for the last five millennia, at least. Once this drive for power-over and domination appeared on the planet, it became a force that no one could escape for more than a breathing space. For either we submit, and it triumphs, or we mobilize to fight against it, diverting our energies and resources and transforming ourselves into what we do not want to be. It’s like a virus, mindlessly destructive, yet we cannot eradicate it without changing our own internal balance.

  “We must develop an immunity to that virus. Not just for ourselves, but for the planet. We’ve had a little space of time in isolation, where we could pretend that life could carry on here without too much regard for what went on elsewhere, if only because we had no means to affect it. We have used that time well. We have shown in this City—in this watershed—that even on this ruined and ravaged and poisoned earth, people can live well together, can care for one another, can heal and build in harmony with what is around us. We have demonstrated hope. Now it is up to us to sustain that hope, not to abandon it to the despair of violence.”

  Maya rose. This is my vision, she thought; if I believe it, if even a kernel of me believes it and trusts it, I must speak for it. “I support what Lily is saying. Many years ago, the poet Diane di Prima wrote a line that comes back to me now: The only war that counts is the war against the imagination.’ I often wondered what she meant by it, but now I think I understand. All war is first waged in the imagination, first conducted to limit our dreams and visions, to make us accept within ourselves its terms, to believe that our only choices are those that it lays before us. If we let the terms of force describe the terrain of our battle, we will lose. But if we hold to the power of our visions, our heartbeats, our imagination, we can fight on our own turf, which is the landscape of consciousness. There, the enemy cannot help but transform.”

  She paused for breath. I’m orating, she thought, but that’s okay, the subject calls for it.

  “We old women have learned from our history and its mistakes. Many of you are too young to remember the wealth of the old society, the incredible resources, the power of its technology, the firepower of its weaponry, the sheer abundance of things, so many that they could be shamelessly squandered and wasted. Precious water was fouled by sewage and toxins; whole industries were built to manufacture things to be used once and then discarded.

  “But the greatest waste was war. I remember how we watched in frustration as all of that wealth, so many lives of blooming young men and women, all of our ingenuity and resources were poured down the hole of war after war. The Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Middle East, Latin America, riots in our own burning ghettos, big wars and small wars and endless preparation for nuclear war. We waged war on ourselves with nuclear testing, gave our own citizens cancer and then denied responsibility, poisoned the sacred lands of the Indians and turned great rivers into radioactive sewers, and every time there was a glimpse of peace, we scurried to find a new enemy so we could continue this mindless wasting. Blowing up our wealth, burning it off, turning it into poisons and toxins, shooting it in the belly, shipping it home in body bags, murdering our own children and everybody else’s.

  “And meanwhile we decayed. When I was born, when I grew up in the fifties, we believed our country was the land of opportunity, where nobody was doomed to remain poor, where every person of goodwill had a chance to rise. By the time my child was born in the nineties, beggars were crowding the streets of every city, accosting shoppers in the malls. There were camps of homeless in the parks and empty lots, young people going to war with each other for drugs and booze and a few bucks. Our compassion eroded faster than the topsoil, and when we began to notice the earth changes, the droughts and the warming and the die-offs of the animals, the hole in the ozone layer and the epidemics of strange diseases that showed our own immune systems faltering, when we still had a chance to save so much and avert the worst of what followed, we continued to distract ourselves with war.

  “What I say, what I have always said, is there has got to be an end to it. Now is the time to make an end. There will never be a better time, because there is always a reason to fight and kill and build more guns and weapons. Twenty years ago when we founded this Council we said, ‘Make an end to it—we will not waste what hope is left to us by building weapons of war.’ We knew this day would come; we hoped only that when it did we would have other kinds of weapons to fight with. Now it’s here. Now we had better be ready to take up the challenge, as Lily said. Or we will die, and perhaps the earth will rethink this whole experiment in consciousness and start afresh to grow some other form, less aggressive maybe, less extreme, less surprising.”

  There was a long moment of silence when she finished, and then applause echoed through the hall.

  Good one, Maya, Bird thought. You’ve convinced me.

  When the room grew quiet again, Joseph spoke. “Who else has something to say?”

  Sachiko from the Musicians’ Guild rose. “It seems to me that this decision is both strategic and spiritual. We have a lot of differences in this city. We come from different ancestors, different cultural traditions, different values, different religions—”

  “Water is my religion!” Cress shouted, interrupting her. “Water is my politics, and water is my strategy!”

  Several people applauded, but Salal glared at him. “Interrupting is a form of bullying, Cress. Wait your turn.”

  The Speaker raised her hand, calling for silence, and bent her ear to the Salmon mask.

  “Friend Salmon says, ‘Learn from water. Water is malleable, water is gentle, but drops of water wear away stone, and everything it touches is shaped by its passing.’ ” She sat down again.

  “I was trying to say something,” Sachiko said.

  “Please continue.” Joseph nodded at her.

  “What I wanted to say is this. Spiritually, we come from many different traditions, but what we hold in common, what unites us all, is the Declaration of the Four Sacred Things. It tells us that air, fire, water, and earth are sacred because nothing can live without them. It says that they have a value that goes beyond human ends. And it says that all living beings are part of the earth life, and so sacred.

  “Some of us interpret this to mean that killing is wrong, that we cann
ot engage in war. Some of us won’t even kill a chicken or a catfish. But others among us believe that it tells us to fight and, if need be, sacrifice ourselves to protect the sacred things.

  “If this question were only spiritual, we could debate it all day and never come to consensus, because we don’t agree and maybe we shouldn’t agree. Maybe we need both views in this city. But our dilemma is also practical. And we’ve already acknowledged that we don’t have the weapons to win a war against the Stewards.

  “So what I want to know is, why are we still arguing about whether or not we should use nonviolence? We don’t have another option, so let’s stop wasting time. What we need to be discussing is how to use nonviolence and noncooperation, and make them effective, and win.”

  She sat down to a storm of applause. But Cress jumped to his feet.

  “Why do we assume we can’t win a war? Guerrilla tactics have worked before, in situations just like this, when an invading power tries to conquer a people with strong morale. Why are we limiting ourselves? Sure, try nonviolent resistance, but why rule out sabotage or judicious assassination? We could pick off their leaders and capture more weapons if we can’t produce them.”

  Bird rose.

  “We haven’t ruled out sabotage,” he said. “Already down the peninsula our friends are blowing up their rail lines. That’s different from killing people. Guerrilla wars can be won, but not quickly or easily. Assassinations bring reprisals. We can kill some of them, but they can afford to lose hundreds, thousands, for every one of us, because every single person in this city is precious to us.”

  “You’re afraid,” Cress said. “They’ve intimidated you. You’re scared to take them on.”

  I’ll take you on, asshole, Bird thought, but before he could speak he felt Holybear’s restraining hand on his arm, heard him whisper, “Cálmate.” And why am I letting him get to me? Bird asked himself. Am I secretly afraid that he’s right?

  A low murmur ran through the crowd. He’s lost their sympathy, Bird realized. He’s gone too far.