A boy, 8, was blunt: "Save our future." An 11-year-old girl no less blunt: "If you won't act like adults, we will." A 10-year-old boy had written plaintively: "I'm too old 2 die," while another, a year older, offered this mordant message: "I don't want to live on Mars. I want to live in Manhattan 30 years from now." Many signs were, in their own way, upbeat, but some were deeply dystopian as in one woman's that said: "Don't think of this summer as the HOTTEST summer in the last 125 years. Think of it as the coolest summer of the NEXT 125 years."
There was the woman with a sign that read "Science is not a liberal conspiracy." When my friend congratulated her on it, she responded, "I wish I hadn't been wearing this sign for seven years!" There was the woman carrying a sign that proclaimed, "Here for my son's future." Mounted on it was a photo of a bright-looking baby boy. When asked, she assured me with a smile that he was indeed her child whom she had given this line: "Mom, why didn't you do more?"
And if you don't think this -- multiplied by millions across the planet -- is hopeful, despite heatmongers like Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro now being in power, think again.
Let me assure you, I know what it feels like when a movement is ending, when you're watching a nightmare as if in the rearview mirror, when people are ready to turn their backs on some horror and pretend it's not happening. That was certainly what it felt like as the streets emptied of demonstrators in 2003 -- and there had indeed been millions of them across the planet then, too -- in the wake of the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. It will not, however, be as easy to turn away from climate change as it was from the Iraq War and its consequences (if, at least, you didn't live in the Middle East).
The new climate crisis movement is, I suspect, neither a flash in the pan (since global warming will ensure that our "pan" only gets hotter in the years to come), nor a movement about to die. It's visibly a movement being born.
"And I Mean It!"
Eight-year-old boy's sign at New York climate-strike march on September 20, 2019. Photo: Jim O'Brien
There was the 63-year-old grandmother carrying a sign that said: "I want my granddaughter to have a future! She's due on February 1, 2020." My heart went out to her, because the afternoons I spend with my own grandson are the joys of my life. (He was marching elsewhere that day in a self-decorated T-shirt that said, "Plant more trees.") Yet there's seldom one of those afternoons when, at some unexpected moment, my heart doesn't suddenly sink as I think about the planet I'm leaving him on.
So, even at my age, that march meant something deep and true to me. Just being there with those kids, a generation that will have to grow up amid fossil-fuelized nightmares whose sponsors, ranging from Big Energy companies to figures like Donald Trump, are intent on committing the greatest crime in human history. It's certainly strange, not to say horrific, to have so many powerful men (and they are men) intent on quite literally heating this planet to the boiling point for their own profit, political and economic, and so obviously ready to say to hell with the rest of you, to hell with the future.
So, yes, there's always the possibility that civilization as we know it might be in the process of ending on this planet. But there's another possibility as well, one lodged in the living hopes and dreams of all those kids across a world that is already, in a sense, beginning to burn. It's the possibility that something else is beginning, too. And it's never too late for something new. Increasing numbers of the young are now starting to make demands and, in the wake of that march, I have the feeling that the demanding won't stop until they get at least some of what they want -- and the rest of us so desperately need.
In the end, I'm with the eight-year-old boy who had clipped (quite literally) to the back of his T-shirt what may have been my favorite sign of the march. Begun by him but obviously partially written out by an adult at his inspiration (and then decorated by him), it said: "I'm not cleaning up my room until the grownups clean up the planet -- and I mean it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
As well he should!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2019 Tom Engelhardt
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