A Simple Word

By Jim Harney

Marcos from the hills of Chiapas speaks about “a simple word”, “noble and honest hearts”, the thought of it challenging and trying to articulate it and then find those women and men with pulsating hearts. Marcos imagines that they’re out there.

The challenge: what would I do when I find them? Where would I stumble upon them and what would their concerns be? How would they feel threatened? How would they relate to others threatened?

A simple word - it doesn’t come easy to utter one in a world where language violates rather than ennobles; distances rather than brings us together; obscures rather than clarifies.

So I write trying to take on the task of creating a simple word around money and the instruments used to enrich a few and impoverish many. It seems almost overwhelming to get near the nerves of financial flows and turn them into something I can see, touch, feel or smell, call into question and in the end change. For this money flow around the world moves with a velocity unheard of in human history - every hour, minute, second, millisecond of the day, hurling human beings into poverty as a few grow richer.

A simple word to popularize an arcane reality, home in on it, unleash an energy and cry of resistance that connects with every human being in the process of standing tall, even through the act of doing so might mean death. Standing tall surrounded by love, compassion, solidarity, justice and peace never comes easy, it’s always an edge reality, hardly ever found at the center of power which negates and destroys any attempt for human beings to enjoy marveling at their own beauty.

I’ve seen too much to stand outside of an environ where a simple word comes about. A simple word before environmental destruction going on around me, that’s now happening in New Orleans, that pushes me up against a wall where I stammer, almost driven crazy by the insanity of destruction in the name of development, profit and empire, even in the name of God; at the same time forgetting about human beings.

But I appear floundering, not getting to the simple word that offers some clarification of what I can imagine, what I can do, how I can be something other than a bystander in a time of accepted genocide, incessant warfare, growing military expenditures while most of humanity lives in conditions of slavery.

A simple word caught in the vortex of expanding capital; those who spend their waking hours hoarding it and demanding more of it, creating ways to confound...I’m losing the simple word in a maze of confusion and when that happens those who rake in the dollars laugh as they go about using government to deregulate any vestige of control that prevents them from creating financial instruments that no one understands, and impossible to regulate and yield unheard of profits.

The simple word challenges profit accompanied by bloodletting. It unravels an explanation that focuses on structural rot that breeds it, and allows for those who speak this simple word to imagine the faces of those who live and die as a consequence of unchecked capital expansion.

This powerful, simple word births itself in an ethic, yes an ethic in an amoral world where it becomes all the more difficult to imagine children dying every day, from AIDS, TB and malaria, diseases that murder millions every year in places long forgotten.

Yes, a simple word with Niger in mind connects it to garbage creation as well as wealth and poverty creation in the US - all interwoven but never tied into a common discourse, politic, spirituality and praxis of resistance in creating an alternative.

A simple word capable of addressing our world a word capable of moving us into the nooks and crannies of our emotions deadened by hours of TV replete with language that degrades us rather than enlivens us - market-driven language meant to deaden us, separate us, commodify us, so all that matters is not the world around us but profit.

A simple word: so much depends upon it.