White Men in Suits

I sat in a room all day yesterday with white men in suits, and I’ll tell you, I can’t take it anymore. On my way home in the car I rolled down the windows, turned Aretha on full blast, and stopped for an Oreo ice cream bar to cleanse my soul and restore my sanity, or what’s left of it.

My poor compañera, the director of the anti-nuclear community group whose board I sit on, had to be in the same room with these white men in suits for two weeks straight while they bickered over the hazardous waste permit the state will be issuing to Los Alamos National Laboratory. How has it come to this, that these white men in suits can tell us it’s OK to burn chemical waste in the open air to rain down into our soil and water? How can they deny their fiduciary responsibility to clean up the mess they’ve made making bombs? How can they insist that their monitoring wells that have numerous structural problems can adequately tell if our aquifers are being contaminated?
Of course, I’ve also sat in many rooms with white guys in green uniforms telling me it’s OK to use herbicides on noxious weeds in the forest, that acequias need to get special permission from them—our friend the Forest Service—to work on our headgates or diversion dams even though the acequias predate them, and that ski area expansion are good because they provide jobs.

These white guys in suits and green uniforms are the professionals. Just because they’ve built enough bombs over the past 55 years to blow up the world a thousand times over and clearcut enough forests and suppressed so many forest fires that we now live in a tinder box waiting for catastrophic fire to burn us to smithereens doesn’t mean we have the right to question their authority or judgment. I can see it in the paternalistic roll of their eyes when we (brown people, women, white men in jeans) sit across the table from them, meaning, oh Christ, here we go again, what a waste of time this is when we know we’re going to go ahead as planned. They’re thinking, these people just don’t get it, they don’t live in the real world, while we’re thinking, these guys have created a world no one in their right mind would want to live in.
It’s a perpetual impasse, of course. It’s nothing new. It’s just the consequences are now so enormous and we all know they’re so enormous that apparently it renders us helpless. That’s not really a fair analysis, but that’s how it seems sometimes. Is our postmodern world so fragmented, so transient, ambiguous, and fetishized that we can’t figure out how to take unified action because we can’t figure out who the enemy is? Capitalism? Consumerism? Neo-conservatives? Religious right? (Unrepentant Marxist that I am I think it’s all about capitalism.) Arundhati Roy talks about this dilemma often in her activism—“To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible”—but hopes that we can all take on our individual, localized battles that remain connected to each other despite the power elite’s attempt to identify our common ground as the market place.

Occasionally there are signs of hope. Everyone is down in Bolivia right now at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, where President Evo Morales, who never wears a suit, said to the crowd, “Death to Capitalism!” Of course, some of his own people are concurrently demonstrating in the streets of San Cristóbal against the continued mining of silver by a Japanese corporation, the capitalist signifier of Bolivia’s colonial history, He has a tough row to hoe, figuring out how to nationalize foreign industries to benefit Bolivians while at the same time function in a global economy where capital accumulation continues to define how business is done. But apparently Bolivians have figured out who the enemy is and aren’t afraid to remind their fearless leader when they think he has forgotten. So keep wearing those brightly colored woven shirts and wool sweaters, Señor Morales, to keep our hopes close to your heart.