"No," said Harry. "I don't mean we should fight with each other. I mean, let's think about the concept of fighting. We do it with little twigs in our hands. We consider 12 friends and a dog to be a major army. But how do the Muggles do it?"
"Merlin's socks, Harry," responded Hermione excitedly, "you might be onto something that's been known and unknown even to us. We're such superior beings in our imagination, yet we unquestioningly build an assumption of irredeemably evil others into everything, to the point where violence is so essentially normalized that we can't actually observe it."
"Excuse me," said Ron, "could you please say that again in Parseltounge, because it would be easier to understand that way?"
"Right," said Harry, ignoring Ron, "we declare Voldemort eternally and irredeemably evil and accept that I have no choice but to murder him, or at least get implausibly lucky and have him technically murder himself while I'm trying to do it, because we believe in prophecies and the categorizing of some beings as Dark and others as Light. But Muggles are all, I mean they're all just Muggles, aren't they? The best ones can do evil and the worst ones good. And yet they think the way we do even though they have no basis to do it."
"And so" continued Hermione, "they needn't fight if they choose not to fight, and the key to all of this is the question you asked before: How do they fight?"
"Oh," said Ron, "I know this one. Lamely. I mean, pathetically actually. No disrespect to your parents, Hermione, but my grandmother's grandmother's pet slug could fight better than . . . "
"Exactly," Harry said to Hermione, continuing to ignore Ron. "They don't fight with wands or as individuals. They fight with an enormous industry, one of the most profitable, one of the most destructive, one of the greatest consumers of petroleum and polluters of air and water and soil, a permanent machinery of endless war preparation so huge that its own momentum creates fighting, and so huge that it fades into the wallpaper."
"And what," Hermione almost shouted triumphantly, "has been quietly left out of all the climate agreements, all the Muggle plans for halting the destruction of the climate? One of the biggest ways that they destroy the climate: militaries! Some of the Muggles are paid to keep militaries out of the agreements, of course. And some of them honestly think wars are more important than preserving life on the planet. Some of them think there's nothing really to worry about anyway. And most of them haven't noticed what's going on."
"Wait," said Ron, "are you two hyped-up hippies proposing that we become peace activists?"
Harry and Hermione looked at each other and then said in unison, "Yes!"
"Well, OK," said Ron. "That's the first good thing you've said since we got on this train. And look what I just found on my phone: http://cop26.info ."
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