Why I Do What I Do
For writing publically about what I know and telling others that, after actively supporting Bernie Sanders for President, I then registered for the Green Party and am supporting Jill Stein, I have been told I am a narcissist.
Like so much on Medium, the article that asserts that this is true has many more likes, and one might presume, reads, than the few tens of thousands of readers for the articles I have written documenting the Clinton Foundation’s poor use of the hundreds of millions of dollars provided to them for theoretically charitable use.
The truth is, I am one of a small number of North Americans who score so low on an official “Narcissism” test (5 out of 40) that I am genuinely interested in a film called When Two Worlds Collide, about the ongoing destruction and devastation of the Amazon.
I learned about this movie from one of the best artists of our generation, a gentleman who lives in San Diego with whom I am proud to say, I am friends. His name is Mario Torero. Mario is son to Guillermo Acevedo, one of Peru’s best artists, who emigrated to the United States during the 1940s. Doubtless you will not know their names, but you may recognize the artwork of both son and father.
Mario’s paintings have very clear messages.
He is confident and able to speak clearly about what he values and believes.
I have always felt a kinship to the land, and nature is very important to me. I love nature and animals and I believe part of the reason our culture is so physically, spiritually and mentally ill is that we are being poisoned each day. We can’t even take two minutes out of our day to learn about something we haven’t heard before, like the story of how the indigenous people in Peru have fought so hard to keep the Amazon from being destroyed by international oil interests operating in complicity with their own Peruvian government.
But many of us can take many hours out of our days to watch YouTube videos depicting sex or violence. Or we can play PokemonGo and watch videos about fake celebrities like the Kardashians as one of these YouTube commenters notes.
This isn’t my problem, and it isn’t Mario’s problem.
It’s the problem of those who live their lives that way. It isn’t just cigarettes or tobacco that are so addicting. It’s our food, it is all the toxic chemicals, and the toxic ideas and behavior we ingest so constantly. People addicted to toxic ideas and toxic non-thinking love to see the endless, identical commentary. They love to see the never-ending series of books all the same that tell all of the same stories they have heard a thousand, million times before.
There was in the past, I think, many thousands of years ago, some reason for human beings to think, act and be this way.
That reason is gone. Now, behaving and acting this way makes for an unhappy, typically unhealthy life — whether you are killed outright, or live in horrible conditions in countries where the natural resources are being stolen and exploited (like Peru) or live in a country that benefits physically from the theft and exploitation (like America).
Even those at the top of these piles of bones, blood, teeth, shit, jizz and piss and the debris left behind by tons of C4 and TNT, the earthmovers, the ashes of the fires from burning of thousands of square miles of forest, the animals slaughtered after living short, horrible, miserable lives — are their lives any better?
No.
As to this film, I was unsurprised to see it received a poor review in the New York Times. It is an independent documentary film. It is co-directed by a woman. And it tells a story the reviewer is incapable of caring about or genuinely understanding. The review features a common technique of criticism of this nature: it focuses on one small part of the movie and uses it to invalidate the film as a whole: boring, pedestrian, meaningless.
There is most certainly a fight going on and it’s ultimately a fight to live as fully-human instead of killing, eating, shitting, fucking and pissing machines, then dying alone and afraid.
I fight for my own life as fully-human. That is why I am not a narcissist, that is why I do what I do, and that is why I am a Green Party member and voting for Jill Stein.
Amy Sterling Casil is the author of 30 nonfiction books, 3 novels, 3 short fiction & poetry collections, hundreds of articles, and also is a former high-level nonprofit fundraiser and executive, and a business planner and developer, primarily for women and non-traditional owners. You can buy her most recent book (sci fi short stories all about women) via Amazon or the largest, oldest author publishing cooperative, of which she is a co-founder.
