Blessed Are The Trouble-Makers

Mission statement of a community demolitionist “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No I tell you, but division.” Jesus Christ in Luke 12:51 “Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet is the one essential, vital, quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.” Robert F. Kennedy I came to this small community to disturb and rankle you. To provoke your conditioned responses and refute them. To challenge your socially acceptable prejudices with socially outrageous truths. To promote mental yoga by forcing your brain to establish new neural pathways to process your prefabricated information in alternative ways. I came not to build upon a rotten foundation but to tear it asunder. I am not a community-builder but a community-demolitionist. I came to force unspoken and unacknowledged disagreements to the surface with provocative and disrespectful questions so that they may examined and resolved. I came to excavate the dormant truth rather than bury it with soothing falsehoods. I came to yank the self-proclaimed enlightened ones from CBC-life support so that they may survive by intellectual self-reliance and impartial research, rather than their lazy dependence on Sierra Club sound bites. I came to disturb your comfort zone because in our collective crisis no one has a right to be comfortable. Progress depends on unreasonable people, not the meek or the pliable. I came to rip off the bandage of friendly banalities, false harmony, manufactured consent and superficial smiles and expose the festering wound of subterranean acrimony beneath it so that it can be lanced with satire, derision and criticism. Venting it with small town covert gossip is not a cure but a disease of the cowardly. From the imposition of artificial unity comes simmering, septic resentments that ultimately erupt in war. Yugoslavian peace becomes a Balkan war. Delusion and denial do not make for a lasting armistice. From civil wars comes durable harmony. Fevers cannot be cured by throwing out the thermometer nor wounds healed without ventilation. Beware of the “peacemakers” for they do not bring peace but an uneasy truce with unresolved disputes and a prescription of reconciliation and forgiveness for the corrupt and unrepentant. In reality I did not come as a trouble-maker because I already found it here hidden under lock and key by those afraid to air it out. I merely wish to release it with Gestalt therapy on a public scale. I came not to be your emotional caretaker or take responsibility for your reactions and interpretations. I am not obligated to live by your limitations or submit to your chosen mantle of victimhood. If need be I will defy your taboos. In an authentic and robust democracy there can be no constitutional right not to be offended. You can choose not to take offense. I ask for no quarter, for none will be given. Growth-boosters and growth-managers will not suffer critics in our secular growthist theocracy. Fighting growth in one’s local community is a lonely crusade, and ostracism is the price of candour. But censure from the morally relativistic and depraved culture of trendy green capitalism is a badge of honour. Soon the corrupt, money-grubbing corporate lackeys of the Sierra Club hierarchy and their fake green clones will follow the economic system that nurtures them to the dustbin of history. To their willfully ignorant dupes I throw a gauntlet----read to challenge your belief system rather than shore it up. Your cosmetic gestures and trivial sacrifices are the marker of fake rebellion that does nothing to disrupt the structure of this suicidal society. Taking fewer showers and recycling your garbage will not topple the institutions of ecological ruin and insatiable exploitation. Feel-goodism is a safety valve for dissent, not a vehicle of change. You cannot consume your way to sustainability. We do not need green consumers, but fewer consumers. I have been called an extremist. But are my views extreme or is it our predicament that is extreme? Extreme growthism provokes extreme anti-growthism. Sometimes the truth is offensive. If you elect to be offended, your perceptions of me are not of my concern. I know who I am. I am a writer, and writers are not elected to be kind, but to liberate the truth and set you free. Tim Murray, environmental writer and anti-growth activist.