Time to unite over climate change
HOW many MPs, teachers, parents and grandparents have given their blessing to ‘Youth Strike 4 Climate’?
Inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, (protesting outside the Swedish parliament, every Friday since August), schoolchildren around the globe are backing her. With up to 70,000 taking part each week, there have been (school) strikes in Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond.
In the UK, the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) have given their blessing: “When you get older pupils making an informed decision, that kind of thing needs to be applauded. Society makes leaps forward when people are prepared to take action.”
What has landing on the moon - “one giant leap for mankind” - done to today’s children? With alcohol/drug addiction, ISIS, and self-harm
- a leap into hell?
In response to the UK strike, Toby Young, formerly director of the New Schools Network, a free schools charity, has penned an article condemning it: “If children want to protest against climate change, why not do it at the weekend? From a school’s point of view, this kind of thing is a nightmare.”
And of the NAHT, he wrote: “That is incredibly shortsighted.” (Drugs, droughts, floods, starving children, and death by beheading and wildfire, isn’t a nightmare?)
“History will judge us all for the parts we have played in this process,” Theresa May wrote in a plea to Conservative MPs, to back her Brexit deal. “Our party can do what it has done so often in the past: move beyond what divides us and come together behind what unites us; sacrifice if necessary our own personal preferences in the higher service of the national interest.”
For the sake of the world’s children, doesn’t every nation on Earth - our home - now need to ignore its national interests, and unite against climate change?
Since the end of World War I - ‘the war to end all wars’ - how many children have been sacrificed in the name of bigger and faster? How many have been sacrificed in the name of Brexit? And, how many more will be sacrificed to adults’ ‘addiction’ to travelling/ working faster, and growing bigger and wealthier?
ALLAN RAMSAY