Thunberg mural in Edmonton vandalized
Several genuine Big Boys, absolute adults who won’t be pushed around by the likes of you, took the time this weekend to deface a mural of a Swedish teenager in Edmonton.
Local artist AJA Louden painted the portrait of climate activist Greta Thunberg on a graffiti wall in the Alberta capital Friday. On Sunday, as a reporter from CBC looked on, a grown man spray painted a message — “This is Oil Country — over Thunberg’s face.
“We don’t need foreigners comin’ in and telling us how to run our business, support our families, put food on our tables,” the man, who identified himself as James Bagnall, told the CBC .
He added that Thunberg should “just shut up” until she had “solutions.”
Thunberg, 16, spoke to a crowd of thousands in Edmonton on Friday. Edmonton Journal columnist David Staples called her speech “gracious,” “articulate,” “composed,” and “forceful.”
After her North American tour ends, how is Greta
Thunberg getting home?
She told the crowd that richer “countries such as Canada and Sweden need to get down to zero emissions much faster so people in poorer countries can heighten their standard of living by building the infrastructure we have already built,” according to Reuters.
The news agency reported that honking horns from a counter protest, organized by pro-pipeline group United We Roll, could be heard in the background as Thunberg spoke.
Louden posted a video of his mural, painted on a kind of freeexpression wall near the Alberta legislature, on Twitter Friday.
By Sunday afternoon, the original image was barely visible beneath all the painted vitriol.
“Agent provacateur out of Canada!” one message read. Another derided Thunberg with an especially graphic French slur. On either side of the original portrait, Louden wrote the words “Thank you, Greta” and “thank you, Beaver Hills Clan,” the later a reference to the grassroots environmental group that helped organize Thunberg’s visit.