By Elaine Cimino
Rio Rancho, New Mexico — Middle Rio Grande
People keep asking a polite question: How are you doing?
The honest answer is harder—and it matters.
There is no rest for the weary because rest assumes safety. It assumes someone else is holding the line. It assumes the damage is not cumulative. None of those assumptions hold for communities living at the edge of extraction, militarization, and climate collapse.
We are living inside a war economy that celebrates acceleration while dismantling the conditions for life. Militarization is framed as security. Extraction is framed as progress. Sacrifice is framed as inevitability. And frontline communities are expected to absorb the cost quietly, gratefully, and without interruption.
Militarization is not separate from climate collapse—it accelerates it. The war economy demands secrecy, speed, and exemption from civilian safeguards. It normalizes contamination, suppresses dissent, and converts public land and public funds into instruments of permanent conflict. When militarization expands, democratic process contracts. Communities become test sites, buffer zones, and collateral. Opposing militarization is not abstract pacifism; it is a defense of life, land, and civilian governance.
From where we stand, there are no guardrails left. Not on climate. Not on corporate power. Not on militarization. Not on the procedural erosion of democracy that allows irreversible decisions to be made without consent, scrutiny, or accountability.
This is not abstract authoritarianism. It is administrative. It is bureaucratic. It is polite. Public hearings are shortened or bypassed. Environmental review is segmented or delayed. Legal language is deployed to exhaust rather than inform. Normalcy is preserved while consent is erased.
The war economy does not only devastate distant landscapes or foreign populations. It lands directly on our bodies. It contaminates water, pollutes air, degrades health, fragments communities, and concentrates harm along predictable lines of race, class, geography, and disability. These are not unintended consequences. They are structural features.
We live with poisoned water treated as acceptable collateral. Dirty air framed as a tradeoff. Preventable illness normalized as the price of “economic development.” Our communities are turned into sacrifice zones—and then told to be grateful for the opportunity.
This is why there is no rest.
What we owe the next generation is not silence or symbolic concern. We owe them a record. Proof that we spoke when it was dangerous. That we documented what happened when institutions failed. That we refused to normalize the unacceptable.
Continuity does not mean clinging to power. It means passing on evidence. It means making sure no one can later say they did not know, that no one warned them, that the harm was unforeseeable.
Authoritarian systems depend on amnesia. They rely on fatigue, isolation, and the myth that resistance is episodic rather than sustained. Creating a public record—testimony, data, memory—is one of the few tools that reliably disrupts that cycle. It is how truth survives long enough to matter.
Speaking out is not about winning every battle. It is about refusing to disappear. It is about ensuring that when the inevitable question is asked—how did this happen?—there is an answer that cannot be buried.
This is not heroism. It is obligation born of proximity. When your water is contaminated, when your air makes you sick, when decisions are imposed without consent, neutrality is not an option. Silence is compliance.
In our communities, there is often only one road in and out. A highway that cannot hold during evacuation. We have seen how this ends: people told to wait, traffic stalled, flames advancing, lives lost—not by accident, but by design.
That is what profit over people looks like on the ground.
So we continue, even with fatigue. Not because the system wants to listen—but because history does. Because the people who come after us deserve more than platitudes. They deserve a map of how resistance works. They deserve to inherit truth, not erasure.
Hope does not live in comfort.
It lives in refusal.
~ Elaine Cimino is an artist, activist, and author with 35 years of experience in land-use and environmental justice, focused on climate and health impacts, anti-fracking work, social equity, and peace-based resistance to extractive and militarized systems.
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