Shudder at Greta’s thunder

Mufasa! Did you shudder, like the hyaenas in The Lion King do when the boss of the savannah’s name is mentioned?

“Ooh, do it again!” they say, giggling, freaked out. “Mufasa!”

Now let me try another: Greta Thunberg!

Same effect? All too often there is. For many people – adults, white, middle-class, privileged – the teenage climate change activist has become a trigger.

This smart, vivid little creature has even had death threats.

And so, last week, some genius put out an advertisement for a (joke) helpline for adults who couldn’t cope with Greta Thunberg. Google it. Hilarious! Well, I thought so.

Then I forwarded it to a friend in Cape Town.

“Must say, very bored by this First World privileged kid,” she immediately replied from her own First World, privileged position, without an ounce of irony. Now I’m left wondering why… After all, Greta is merely making us face the obvious: you guys have screwed up, she says; now you need to fix it.

But in our traditional top-down system – built on the model of listening to the grown-ups without question, of respecting your elders, of shutting down young dissenters, of telling kids we know better – an unsmiling Asperger’s teenager speaking truth to power has become the embodiment of everything the establishment resents and wishes to silence.

Still, she resolutely refuses to be cowed by all the shouting uncles and aunties in the world.

Curiously though, the Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai – herself an activist from the age of 12, shot in the head in Pakistan when she was 15 – never got this level of loathing.

Was it because she was deemed other, different, because she suffered personally?

Perhaps the issue is that Greta is not other; she is us.

Greta represents our own children. She is privileged, white… but she is not blind. Our children are rallying behind her too, regardless of colour, wealth, religion or gender, and we cannot control them.

Nor should we want to. Greta is not here to make you comfortable. She’s here to make a difference.

Without people like her, the world is going to get a lot less comfortable, too.