Moore goes on to talk at length about gratitude
later, in "The Night of the Razor-Clam Tide." She believes that gratitude "is a kind of seeing, an awareness of the magnitude of the gift of this earth." That gratitude is attentiveness. That it is a kind of terror, and that the gifts of this world come undeserved and we have no claim against the universe for starlight or clams. "Rain is not a birthright," she says. "The world is contingent, improbable, beyond our control: it could be, or not." That gratitude is a kind of rejoicing. And that gratitude is a moral obligation, owed to the earth itself. "To be grateful is to live a life that honors the gift," she says.
"To care for it, keep it safe, protect it from damage.... To celebrate it, to honor the worth of it in a thousand ways, not just in words, but in how we live our lives."
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How we live our lives. Hmmm. Moore talks about personal responsibility in "The Parable of Rats and Mice:"
"A mouse was crushed," Jon said as he loaded the tent bag into the boat. He and Frank and I had been camping on a gravel bar in the Willamette River, not far from home.
I looked up from my oatmeal.
"What are you talking about?"
"A mouse died under our tent."
"Of what?"
"Crushing."
Nobody talks this way.
"What kind of mouse?" I asked. "How crushed?"
"Deer mouse, I guess," Jon said. "Very...."
"It was under my sleeping pad, wasn't it," I demanded....
A mouse was crushed, we say. The forest was cut. The birds were poisoned. An opossum was run over. A good time was had by all. So nobody's acting here, only being acted upon....
I think about this story and wonder what it means. One thing, I think, is clear: I should go on full alert if I hear myself say, "I'm not the one who does harm; harm just happens around me." Like it or not, I own the consequences of my acts. They're mine. That mouse is mine.
Thank God, I say. Nothing aggravates me quite so much as someone's refusal to accept responsibility for her actions. Whether it is a president whose misguided foreign policy increasingly troubles the world or the old lady who put a hot cup of McDonald's coffee between her legs and was burned when she spilled it, or a writer who crushes a mouse beneath her sleeping pad while camping on a gravel bar in the Willamette River, we own our actions, and we should accept responsibility for them. Increasingly among us there are those who wish not to own their actions, who think they do not act but rather are acted upon, who are "victims;" Moore is not among that ugly bunch.
TIRADE MODE ON: I suppose there is no politic way to say this: the tragedy in New Orleans is not that Hurricane Katrina blew in and breached the levees, but that so many people had chosen to build their houses and live their lives below sea level in a region through which hurricanes such as Katrina are known to blow. Each soul chooses where it wishes to be. By default, not to choose is a choice one makes. Unfortunately, we seem to hear about personal responsibility only from the God-hugging right-wingers; yet we need to be having a serious national discussion about our responsibilities, not only about accepting responsibility for our own actions, which is what the God-huggers want, but also about our responsibilities to and for each other and our responsibilities to and for the natural world around us. I'll add that the problem of responsibility in our country is compounded because we have too damn many lawyers willing to go to court in an attempt to find someone else to blame for choices we've made.
A sojourn in the wilderness has much to teach us of responsibility. Giving yourself to the water in scuba diving, you are acutely reminded that: (1) each diver is responsible for himself/herself; and (2) you are also responsible for your dive buddy. Canoeing in the wilds of Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, it becomes clear that: (1) you've got to save yourself for there's no one out there who's going to save you; and (2) all of us on the expedition, we're in this together, and we'd better act like it.
I know it might sound as if I'm beating up the wrong people here, and I don't mean to do that. There are a lot of incentives in place to lead people astray, to encourage bad decisions, and those who offer such incentives need to be called to account as well. Those who took tax money and spent it on war instead of the upkeep of infrastructure also need to be taken to task - and it's our responsibility, each of individually and all of us collectively, to see that they are. :TIRADE MODE OFF.
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Concludes in Part Seven, below....
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