I’m a radical, yes. An
environmentalist, yes. A small-is-better zealot, yes. A feminist, a
fierce supporter of independent bookstores, a rabble rouser. I’ve
been called a Chicken Little who shrieks, “The sky is falling!” I
admit to all those labels. What I am not, and this is the second
time in a decade I’ve been smeared with the word, is a Nazi.
The local development cabal flung the first glob of muck
when a few of us began to organize to stop a hustler from plunking
a gated golf course “community” around a rare wetland.
“Eco-terrorist tree-hugging b…ch,” began to echo in meeting rooms
and country club bars, or so it was reported to me by more than one
source. I regarded the epithets as a badge of honor, a sign that I
was living right.
This month, though, I was not alone in
being vilified. Wal-Mart used a photo of Nazi book-burners in a
full-page ad in our local paper to attack all the citizens who were
pushing for an initiative that would block the mega-corporation
from building a Supercenter. The company has since promised to
publish another full-page ad to apologize for the first.
Good, but not good enough. I am 65, a woman of the generation who
was alive during the true horror of Nazi atrocities. According to
my Random House Collegiate Dictionary, a Nazi
was: “a member of the National Socialist German Workers’
party, which, in 1933, under Adolf Hitler, seized political control
of Germany.”
I read the bland definition, and I remember
the older members of the Jewish Community Center in my Northeastern
hometown. To a man, to a woman, they were all short; more than a
few favored long sleeves; more than a few seemed old and worn out
beyond their years.
“Malnutrition,” my friend told me,
“long sleeves to hide the numbers tattooed on their wrists. They
have lived 50 lifetimes to our one.” Her grandmother had been in
the camps and survived. “I will never forget,” my friend said, “I
will never forget what my Bubba has told me I must not forget.”
Does Wal-Mart think we forgot? Did their public relations
department decide that we are simply thoughtless, or, worse yet,
afflicted with a comfortable amnesia for the past?
I
remember the villages decimated by the Nazis. And I cannot help but
judge Wal-Mar’s myopic arrogance and disrespect for the
people of my town. I think of an article I read recently in
The New York Times, an article that mourned the
loss of a beloved painting from the New York Public Library. No
thief had taken it; Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton paid $35 million for
the painting by an American artist, “Kindred Spirits,” which had to
be sold to buy books. Walton intends the painting for a
hypothetical Walton museum, to be built in Bentonville, Ark.
Hypothetical supercenter; hypothetical museum. But real
money. Call me a small town hick, but the first question that comes
to mind is: Why didn’t Walton endow New York’s public
library with the money? My second question is closer to home: When
will enough be enough?
My next question arises from my
belief that, in some strange irony, Wal-Mart’s destructive
attack in a small Southwestern paper, and Alice Walton’s
insatiability in the Big Apple, have created a true global village.
Flagstaff, Ariz., and New York are neighbors. All towns are a mere
village compared to the power of Bentonville, Ark.
Here
is the third question: Who are the Waltons’ kindred spirits?
I know mine: New Yorkers, Mom and Pop store owners, Jews, an
impoverished library Board are now kin — linked not by blood,
religion or even residence, but by the greed and overweening reach
of one family. It is as if, not long ago, you and I might have
lived in the Russia of the czars.
My fourth question:
Will your town be next? My fifth: Will you collaborate? No less
social commentators than the makers of the cartoon series South
Park asked this question last year. Kenny and the gang are sent on
a search for the heart of Wal-Mart. They find it hanging on the
wall next to the television department. It is a mirror.
It reflects, perhaps, our willingness to take part in our own
exploitation. As though the members of a village agreed to being
marginalized, and so doing, filed obediently toward their own
disappearance. Call me what you will.
Mary
Sojourner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). She is a writer and
environmental activist in Flagstaff,
Arizona.
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