Editor’s note: We transcribed the following passage from a photographs taken of one of the cardboard boxes taken as evidence from the United Crushing incident. We have transcribed as carefully as possible. If there was a portion of any photo that was impossible to transcribe, we inserted an ellipse with periods, so that each period is equivalent to a single word, each dash equivalent to a single line and each star equivalent to a single paragraph. For example, [ . . – – – * – . . . ] signified an illegible portion approximately two words, three lines and one paragraph, one line, three words long, in that order. We hope that by including a somewhat precise account of the illegible portions, that these may be able to be filled-in, if another transcription is found, or if one of the original boxes or is found in storage. This work includes some timely comments on the experiences we now have with social justice protests.
In another month or two, some future occupant of this room, a fellow prisoner, may come across these writings and take some solace, or perhaps some anger, or perhaps any emotion other than boredom. It seems any professional artist or communicator is satisfied with any emotional interpretation other the boredom. And that occupant will say to himself (I am still of sufficient faith in our future that a woman will never be imprisoned in this particular cabin) will say to himself, “hmm, it seems the world has not changed much since those times, months ago, when corporations imprisoned their own, for crimes against profitability.” I have neither hope nor distress that the future will not be so very much different from today, but just expectation.
We fight against our histories in an effort to control our futures. It works, to degrees, there are some “good” people who help to move humanity in a forward direction, but it seems that their efforts tend to be cancelled out not by “bad” people, but by oblivious people.
Life is saturated in the fantasy that reality is a struggle of good against evil. It’s what builds religions, religious texts and fills the eyes of the projectionist in the movie theater. Unlike the patrons, this poor fellow sees the same scraps of film and hears the same narrative hour after hour, up from the perch of the projectionist booth. The projectionist is the very last link in the chain of this beautiful machine that helps people to forget their lives and feel happy on a rainy Sunday afternoon. All the directors, key grips, beautiful actresses who were plucked from a lunch counter, and the makeup artist uses her facial canvas to fill us with the wonder of symmetries and exceptional features of her form. All these people do all their work, and then hand the finished film to the projectionist who then does what a projectionist tends to do. And then after the film is sufficiently stabilized in its transport through the flickering gates, the projectionist picks up the newspaper, catches up with the Orioles, the Spurs, the Totems and the Buckaroos. Perhaps he tries to apply some differential calculus to avoid the renormalization, in a misguided attempt to satisfy Professor Schwinger. But ultimately, his eyes move upward to the projection porthole, and he watches bits and fragments of whatever flavor of the day had been flown in from Hollywood.
This poor devil, his sight on the prize of doing something useful with his life, economic realities instead force him into that projectionist booth, where he absorbs the story, the epic struggle, the good fight, the meaning of life itself. He is only in the projectionist booth because he was a harder sell than the rest of the patrons, he needed extra programming, he was perhaps a more complicated collection of relays and switches than the average human, and his programming would only take root with 240 more viewings than the average movie enthusiast. He then moves into his place in the world to do what he has been sufficiently programmed. At some point in the distant future, perhaps the projectionist will be replaced by a machine that loads the film automatically, dispenses with mechanical problems with split-second efficiency. Or perhaps movies will someday be projected from a machine in space onto a window in our home where we can watch the movie without leaving our home. And this advancement will undoubtedly be sold under the guise of convenience to the viewer, rather than convenience to the architect of the societal agenda, who simply would rather program society with greater ease than packing influence and effluence into the movie theater.
I suspect that the future occupant of this room will have been pulled from a place similar to mine, where dreams come true, where the story ends happily, where good struggles to overcome evil with epic tales. The machines change, they become better representations of our human desires, it seems that we have done this for a long time as well, long before this cabin was ever built into this ship. My ancestors undoubtedly filled their days in pursuit of a better bred hunting dog, better oxen to pull their plow, better irrigation channels. When the era of mechanization and computerization arrived, I was simply inserted into the process for the same necessary sack of abilities. We gotta do, what we gotta do, so we might as well do it. My own progeny will likely do much the same kind of work that I do, though altered to the mechanisms of the days.
But aware versus unaware. Woken versus slumber. Knowledge versus ignorance. Where are those epic tales of fairy tale triumph? As George Orwell once wrote about the barrel chested British men of his memories, “buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud.” War does that. It reduces a nation of men fit to move mountains into a nation of men fit to push paper. War tends to bury the biggest and strongest because the biggest and strongest no longer win wars. Wars seem to be now waged with an odd form of intelligence, of asymmetry and symmetry. In the future it seems that wars will be a kind of play acting, between those with nuclear capacities and those without, something like the windmilled-arm twerp in the boxing ring held at arm’s length by a professional. And eventually, we will see an era of this twerp who manages to outsmart the professional, but these things tend to be short-lived in the era of nuclear weapons. War will need to transition to a type of new war, where the toll of the war is measured not with funerals, but with digits in the accountant’s records. Good versus evil worked for so very long because the results of loss were truly evil, they were children without mothers, parents without children and people without hope.
But as we move into a slightly more humane future, how can we possibly create new fairy tales out of hope versus oblivion? We’ll need these tools to solve problems that good and evil never could touch.
When Benjamin Brown was shot and killed by police for the crime of transporting a sandwich to his wife, while watching his brothers and sisters demonstrate for social justice, how can good and evil handle such an event? The police officer (or officers if we are to believe the more recent grand jury report) could not have claimed ignorance that pulling a trigger puts human lives at risk. And yet, we try to apply the concepts of good and evil to these disasters, with limited results. Inevitably, the police officers, the troopers and deputies merely work as an extension of us. Their hatreds are our hatreds, but amplified with the muzzle of the gun. We’ll scapegoat early and often because it’s human nature to do so … as any child who has accidentally chomped down on their own tongue can attest, it simply feels better to blame whomever is in the room for their careless ( . . – – . . . . )
This seems to be a problem which will see no immediate solution, since it isn’t good versus evil, but rather hope versus oblivion. We hire these peace officers to protect our lives, our families and our property, and we do so within the nonsensical framework of good versus evil. We have no choice but to employ them under these conditions, because the good versus evil story has been injected into our minds since before motion pictures have found the most precise and scientifically-tested method of doing so. I can only imagine that future people who will be able to simply raise a window shade to watch any movie of their choice beamed directly into their home from an Earth orbit of some kind, will inevitably be programmed with even greater efficiency than the projectionist who always seems to pick up his head to look at the screen when Charlton Heston tells his ape captors to remove their paws. And with similar programming, these enforcers have to find the evil counterpart of the good. Sometimes that’s a Black man with a sandwich. And sometimes we are actually able to lay hands on the police officer who does the job we tell him to do. We will tend to release these enforcers as innocent, because we know on some level that they’ve simply done the job we’ve tasked them to do. Our own oblivion won’t let us acknowledge the reality that We people who pay our taxes to employ these enforcers simply feed them with our own racism and our own weak desire to kill a man for carrying a sandwich. Enough of these weak desires funnel into a relatively small number of enforcers and the result is caskets and then more protests.
The caricatures of closed-minded evil are increasingly becoming the domain of fiction. Racism and intolerance of the future is less the product of evil than oblivion. So using the tool of “good” to fight oblivion is as dysfunction of using the tool of “hope” to fight evil. Oblivion needs to be deconstructed with some measure of knowledge. It needs some level of scientific analysis of the results of our oblivion. We can measure these things in a scientific way and then extract the causes, then derive solutions. But do we have the stomach for such a process? Are we really ready to find that we have in fact bit down on our own tongue and this is nobody’s fault but our own? There is no other choice but to do this, but like the young girl with a splinter in her finger, she will go through a whole day with the dull ache to avoid her mother using a sewing needle to extract. Fixing problems requires some measure of temporary pain. In this case, if we hope to avoid another hundred years of Benjamin Browns we will need to accept our own oblivion and deconstruct. As long as We the people both hire enforcers to protect our lives and property, while simultaneously expecting them to live out our programmed fantasies of good versus evil, we will never allow a deconstruction of our oblivion. We’ll continue to blame the enforcers rather than our own poor chewing skills. And midway through this whole mess somewhere, as these things tend to happen, the positions of power will switch, as they tend to switch. Rather than the minority of hopeful society pushing for change to keep men like Benjamin Brown from being shot, it will be the majority of society who pushes for this change. And given the efficiency of the good versus evil machinery, these people will be as mired in their oblivion as we are today. Eventually, a sufficient scientific effort will deconstruction this particular problem, and likely We the people will disconnect our enforcers from the fairy tales, we will disconnect ourselves from the fairy tales, accept our enormous contribution to this ghastly mess of our own making.
But wouldn’t it be wonderful if that could happen sooner, rather than later? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that could happen in fifty years rather than a hundred? And what of the [ . . . . – – * – . . . . * . . ]
So I sit cross-legged on the floor of this frigate, imprisoned for crimes against profitability, moving my words from some notes that I took years ago, to the sides of cardboard boxes. I do so with a vague hope that my meager and sleep-inducing words will somehow combat the future of movies beamed from space, with robots scurrying through corridors of films, loading up each one individually with a single phone call, projected to the surface. How can inexpertly-written words on scrap of cardboard compete with such technological might? I’ve little confidence that it can, but I have hope that it will. And with my hope, I’ve at least chosen the correct enemy of oblivion. So if my words will have any advantage over those movies, it will be that they are fighting the nonexistent battle of good versus evil, while Rick Yukon fights the battle of hope versus oblivion.