Dear Editor,
Not literally, of course, but figuratively speaking, she represents the next stage of . . .
evolution of humanity. I do have a step-granddaughter, just a few years younger than Greta Thunberg and I have pictures of her giving that “Don’t try to fool me with phoney platitudes” stare, as she looks past me into the future, where she and her cohort will be in charge.
I’ve felt that way most of my life, knowing from an early age that the Great American Dream we post-WW2 boomers were presented was not viable in the long run. The notions that war was a solution, that a lifelong job and a static little cubbyhole were all anyone should hope for, that the world was divided up into nations and religions and races, and that they should compete and fight with one another – all those notions that aren’t worth the pixels it takes for me to write them on a computer screen – all this will vanish like a sand castle washed by a tsunami. But I, like many of my generation, have become comfortably numb in warm security blanket of delusion.
Along comes Greta, and thousands of other students, saying “We’re tired of being shot down in schools; We’re tired of seeing the natural world devastated by petroleum fumes and plastic garbage; We’re tired of being educated for non-existent jobs in an illusory economy which won’t be there when we finish school.” The dinosaur regime that holds money sacred above all else is doomed, and Greta’s generation is the asteroid that will wipe it out.
But in the meanwhile (and the meanwhile could be pretty mean), the dinosaurs will be thrashing about like stegosauruses with their spiked tails, loudly proclaiming that only they, with their billions of dollars and tanks and weapons and lawyers, can save the world from evil – the evil that is them. Innocent creatures may get hurt; many have already succumbed to extinction at the hand of developers; the mad quests for oil and gold, the divisive politics of fear. The hyper-rich can never be satisfied, and the hyper-poor can never be adequately fed and housed. Such an imbalance of the world’s wealth cannot last, and the best we can hope for is to not be in the way when the excrement collides with the oscillator. Or, we can chip away at the imbalance, and dismantle it the same way it was constructed; piece-by-piece.
Robert Wills
Shawville and Thorne, Que.
