By Apani When I envision the government, not its representatives or its soldiers, but the government itself, I don't see much of anything. A big white building, rows and rows of seats for representatives, perhaps a courthouse, or a border wall. The government itself, however, is just lists of laws and rights and trade deals and receipts and convictions — nothing I can touch a hand to or even form in my mind's eye. The so-called Unites States of America, as we know it, is an abstraction. It does not exist in a tangible reality. We are almost all taking part in a collective imagination that we allow to define our lives. Every member of Congress, every president, every voter, every corporate employee, every child reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, all of us have made an unspoken agreement to imagine this country into existence. At any point we can withdraw our consent. In fact, many people do every single day. But many more people will imagine you a criminal or a terrorist if you do so; many more people are not ready to re-imagine the world. When the politicians with imagined authority were met with laws that protect natural land and its inhabitants, they simply imagined new laws and exceptions to secure their project: the infamous border wall. In turn, those of us at the camp and tree-sit in Lochiel, Arizona simply imagined that this wall and its benefactors had no right to murder Cottonwood trees, Saguaro cacti, and all of the human and non-human creatures who dare to get in the way. We see the Los Ajos and Huachuca Mountains, who bow to each other on either side of the valley, as sisters, and we imagine there is no border to divide them. We see the jaguars, who've returned to the valley as a tribe of six, as rightful inhabitants of the land, and we imagine there is no border to divide them. We see our brothers and sisters, our neighbors, and we imagine there is no border to divide us. With this alone, our love and creativity, we delayed construction of the wall in this region. We protected Grandmother Cottonwood, the only survivor of a family of four and in direct path of the double wall, with an omnipresent sitter in her canopy. The neighbors in this community still held hands with one another over the fence. All of us, from humans to grasshoppers to boars to lizards, watched the sun rise over one land. We imagined we were land defenders. We imagined we were warriors. As land defenders, who do we hold responsible for this slaughter? The government? Fisher Industries? What does it really look like to hold a government or a corporation accountable? An imagined institution cannot make reparations or amends, it cannot be prosecuted or imprisoned, injured or killed. There are real people behind these decisions, and they rely on you erasing their identity behind an idea. That idea is so easy to accept because it is so simple: the government and capitalism are at fault for the state of the world, not the overwhelming majority of people who enforce it, including you and I. We are the only ones who can refuse to take part in fascism, made a reality only because someone imagined it. We are the only ones who can confront the individuals committing a genocide. We are the only ones who can stop showing up to work, start growing our own food, and bring consciousness to our communities. The construction of the wall did not stop because we created an organization or a leader or a legal defense; it stopped because we imagined ourselves as the ones who would stand in the way. This camp and tree-sit survived only because of people who cared to dream and put it into action.
The Slingshot Collective