Why I fear Greta the great needs loving help
The most infuriating thing about last Friday’s climate change school strike was not the tide of plastic left behind by protesters, or even the opportunistic rhetoric of politicians jumping on the bandwagon.
No, it was the incessant virtuesignalling on social media of middle-class parents who had decided to accompany their little darlings on their ‘inspirational’ day out. Otherwise known as playing truant.
however much I may care about tackling climate change (and I do), I would never condone my kids bunking off school in order to parade around in ‘F*** Boris’ T-shirts, filling their heads with fear and loathing instead of learning.
The job of parents is to guide children, not the other way round. Which brings me to Greta Thunberg.
As the mother of a 16-year-old myself, a large part of me is deeply impressed by what this remarkable young girl has achieved, and by the strength she has shown in the face of considerable hostility.
But I also see in her someone who, for all her determination, selfpossession and strength of character remains, at the heart of it, a child.
The thing about kids this age is that, however impressive they may seem on the surface, underneath it all there is still a lot of vulnerability. They still need protection and guidance — not that they appreciate it.
The trick is to find a way of allowing them to push boundaries while ensuring they don’t spiral out of control.
GreTA’s problem is that, partly because she is so compelling and partly because she has Asperger’s, any critique of her often results in accusations of bullying. As a consequence, the world at large (and the media, too) is willing to indulge her unquestioningly at every turn.
sure, she deserves to have her voice heard. sure, her strength of character and her single-minded resolve are awesome to behold. But she is also a teenager who needs boundaries, support and guidance from the grownups in her life. Watching her emotionally charged speech this week at the United Nations, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was getting enough.
Where her disciples saw an inspirational rallying cry from the heart, I saw a somewhat distressed kid having a textbook teenage strop. Trembling with barely suppressed fury, she accused world leaders of ‘failing’ her generation, threatening to ‘never forgive’ them if they refused to meet her demands.
her every syllable was charged with teenage outrage.
‘how dare you?’ she fumed. ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.’ You could almost hear the sound of the bedroom door being slammed.
There is no doubt hers is a powerful, important message. But when it is delivered in a howl of fury from a young person who sees everything through the prism of their own narrow experience, the temptation of grown-ups is to roll our eyeballs, not roll up our shirt sleeves.
Because the truth is that real life is not as simple as Greta would want it to be. Climate change is undeniably a huge problem we must all face; but governments and politicians cannot tackle the crisis overnight at the expense of what she so disparagingly refers to as the ‘fairy tales of eternal economic growth’. These considerations may not be very fashionable, but they are no less important for it.
In the end, it will be adults who resolve this crisis, not children (only yesterday the Government announced plans to double the UK’s international climate finance spend to help developing countries reduce emissions).
Greta has done wonders in representing a generation that has neither the maturity nor the wherewithal to produce workable solutions.
‘This is all wrong,’ she said in her speech. ‘I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean.’ she is completely right. If only those egging her on could see that.