[ad_1]
Today, January 3, Greta turns 18. For Italy he would finally be considered of legal age, worthy to vote and live independently. However, the gap between maturity and the extreme wisdom that this girl has shown in just two and a half years of climate action (the first blow in solitude, I remember, was in August 2018), and with her all the millions of the kids who follow and fight her, and the utter stupidity and ignorance of those who are officially considered adults.
In a few months, Greta thunberg has managed to impose on the attention of the media and politics an absolutely forgotten issue such as that of climate change. If today we talk about climate, if today we begin to understand the immensity of the threat to our lives of global warming, it is also thanks to him. Without “sanctifying” it, we can say that in a certain sense Greta Thunberg has perhaps saved us.
I spoke about her by chance a few days before the closing of schools, at my son’s school. I decided, in agreement with the teacher, to rent the documentary film that talks about the life of Greta from August 2018 to September 2019, and to present her explaining to the children (ten years old) who Greta is and what that film tells. The summary was easy: Greta is a normal girl, who loves being at home with her parents, playing with her beloved dogs, studying.
The only difference with the others is that when you saw a documentary about the melting of glaciers and the polar bears who were drowning, he didn’t go home pretending nothing happened, but began to think: if what I saw is true, we can’t pretend nothing happened. We cannot say and document that all this exists and yet continue in everyday life. So it started Strikealone, in the cold, after a period of depression and pain caused by this very contradiction.
Little by little others joined in, it was noticeable and from there it was a crescendo of invitations and interventions, culminating with the trip to New York and the speech at the summit of the United Nations, where, angry, he shouted his “How dare you“,” How dare you. “” This is all wrong, it shouldn’t be here, it should be at school, “he said in that moving speech, which many expected much softer and almost grateful for the invitation.
What I also explained to my son and his companions are two things. First, being famous is not easy. It wasn’t because of Greta, who I used to live with anxiety his role, too heavy for such young shoulders. Second, that be famous it means being exposed to threats and insults, which incredibly have come not so much from strangers on social media, but from world leaders and also from journalists (I’m thinking of the nickname “gretina” coined by us). Jair bolsonaro, Donald trump, the most famous men in the world attacked her violently, she always reacted with irony, using Twitter smartly and like a real adult. And in the end, without a doubt, he won.
That he returned to school and today -many wonder what he does- continues in his work as always and with the same rigor and method as always: publish Scientific data, divulge them, continue report the severity of the climate crisis and the inaction of governments, even the greenest (like New Zealand), but also the gap that exists between the pandemic crisis, “treated as it should have been or as an existential crisis and threat” and the climate crisis.
A crisis that continues to be addressed only intellectually, as a subject, but not precisely as a real one health attack and to life, as it should be. “New year same crisis“, Tweeted on the occasion of the end of the year Greta. How to blame her.
But Greta didn’t just literally rock them consciences of millions of people, rigorously, without ever making a mistake in step or tone, always following their beautiful motto “United behind the science“In recent months she has had a fundamental function, which no one else has been able to do like her: give a voice to young people from around the world and in particular from poor nations and completely ignored by the media.
Thanks to social media, particularly Twitter, Greta relaunches them protests and the images of young people who do not show us any news, very young people from Asian or African countries that are the most affected by climate change and who feel the most anger, to the extent that they understand that their miserable condition is mainly due to the style life of the richest.
Nobody talks about the effects of climate change in poor countries, much less those that affect us, and yet it is a huge issue that has to do with global justice. It is also, I would say, a real problem. In this regard, Greta, who does not suffer from narcissism like the many who attacked her, has never had a problem engaging and giving voice to young and growing climate leaders in various countries.
For all this, the attacks and criticism of this girl, who turns eighteen today but has been an adult for some time, are simply pathetic. And they certainly have one misogynistic background profound, which joins the sad belief, so widespread in our country, that young people, especially women, cannot say and do better things than adults, especially men in their fifties and eighties who have the levers of power , many times without having any competition certainly in the climatic field.
For work, I usually deal with the guys from the Friday For future, born precisely as a result of Greta. Children who by twenty already know everything about the melting of permafrost, inflection point (points of no return), decarbonizzazione, fine powder. Well-trained people who write, strike, fight for free, while our Parliament still cannot vote fundamental laws on the environment such as against plastics or to eliminate fossil fuel financing, or to draft a Recovery Fund that really allows our country to make an energy and green transition.
There is a risk that money will not. There is a risk of failing in a fundamental point for our survival, if it is true that an in-depth work by the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change supposes a temperature rise in Italy up to 5 degrees at the end of the century. In short, an impossible habitat to live in. This is what Greta is talking about. Of our lives and our survival, nothing more.
And then we really have to ask ourselves if this is not the time to give a voice to the youngest, in the first place with the much-announced reform of the vote at sixteen that never materialized. And give them too action spaces, always instead prohibited in favor of occupying the seats of power for too long. Today I would feel much safer if I were in Parliament There were children aware of the climate crisis than adults or the elderly who do not even know what we are talking about.
And I would feel much more secure with a young woman like Greta Thunberg, not only informed but also deeply sensitive to the pain of the poor and the smallest, in key roles of power that of men who do not know what heating global in megacities made of shacks and without air conditioning, but also in our urban suburbs when temperatures reach 40 degrees. Men unable to empathy, which is the faculty that links knowledge of content with feelings. Something essential to govern and legislate.
For all this, in short, I wish Greta a happy birthday, who continues to fight against governments and men of power who are absolutely “minor” when it comes to talking about global climate crisis. That officially becoming an adult should at least avoid the insults of those who have always despised her as a child, as when Bolsonaro defined her as a “brat.” Today, although very young, she is a woman. For this reason, perhaps even scarier for those who want to leave things exactly as they are.
[ad_2]
