Feeling The Yearn
Time to stop quarreling with one another and join the rising tide of a youth-led movement for transformational change
Tears were in my eyes on Friday, September 20, 2019 when I joined thousands of secondary school students on the streets of San Francisco’s Financial District for a climate strike that occurred simultaneously in hundreds of cities worldwide. I was surrounded by kids averaging fifteen years of age, one fifth my age. Some, including a whimsical musical ensemble, were as young as ten. Despite the gravity of the theme — a climate crisis threatening the end of the world as we know it — the atmosphere was actually celebratory. Seeing one another in such numbers engaged in an activity so much more vital and vibrant than math drills must have felt to them like a group epiphany, a collective “woke.” They were finally not alone in their private anguish about a future they could no longer count on. Recalling my own youthful experiences marching for peace in the 1960's, I felt that familiar exhilaration in the resurgence of hope and confidence as it sprouted anew from the black asphalt of Market Street.
Around the world four million people marched that day, prompted to take action by one fifteen-year-old girl in Stockholm who had taken it upon herself to leave school on Fridays and stand in front of the Swedish Parliament with a handwritten sign calling for world leaders to take decisive action to halt climate catastrophe. Hers was a solitary act, a personal witness to her despair in the face of a seemingly implacable fate. In a newly published book about her daughter’s awakening (Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis), opera singer Malena Ernman described the spiritual and physical decline of Greta Thunberg when she was just eleven years old: “She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.”
“She saw what the rest of us did not want to see”
Diagnosed as having high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome, OCD and eating disorders, Greta lost more than 20 pounds from her already slight frame and retreated into silence and depression. Fearful of other children, she withdrew into herself and became the target of bullying and ridicule. Her parents finally realized that this was more than a personal struggle: “She saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO2 emissions with her naked eye. The invisible, colourless, scentless, soundless abyss that our generation has chosen to ignore.”
To Greta’s surprise her simple but challenging witness in front of the Swedish Parliament gathered attention more rapidly and widely than anyone could have imagined. The impact of her act may have been a first in history, still something of a mystery given that it came from someone so young and troubled. She had been habitually overlooked and undervalued by her own classmates for her silence and hyper-sensitive nature. Yet when she went public with her protest she demonstrated an almost preternatural poise, a directness impossible to ignore. She simply stood in her truth. Something about her unnerved more than a few of the world’s most notorious bullies, including Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. They sought to dismiss her as a “brat” and in the process only succeeded in further diminishing their own already sinking stature. As for Greta, coming into her own as a climate changer brought her out of her adolescent isolation and despair. Her parents report that she is now finally happy and at peace with herself, though still impatient with a world that’s so slow to change. Her revival testifies to the redemptive power of finding your life purpose and pursuing it with all you have to give.
Greta’s accomplishment owes its success in part to the fact that she is so young yet so commanding in her presence. Haunted by fears for the future, she has become fearless in her actions to do what she can to avert catastrophe. On what she announced as her final Friday for the Future on September 8, 2019, she encouraged others to follow suit with their own acts of public witness, but she expected little follow-up. Yet just two weeks later, with no prior planning or publicity budget and only themselves to organize the hundreds of events that occurred worldwide, millions of young people stepped out of their routines and into their own truths. On Market Street that unnaturally warm autumn day I fell in with a couple of sixteen-year-old girls as they marched and asked them what their parents thought about their skipping school.
“Do they think you’re playing hooky?” I teased them. They grinned and laughed.
“They love it!” they crowed in unison.
“And what about your grandparents?” I asked, since I was two generations older than they.
“My grandma was at the March on Washington in 1963!” one proudly announced. I guess the protest gene must run in the family.
Further along towards the Ferry Building I came across a parade marshal. She was directing the vanguard of a march of thousands with a simple bullhorn. “Have you ever done this kind of thing before?” I asked.
She grinned and shook her head, smiling. “Not really. But teens are so much better organized than adults.”
I’ve often wondered whether for all the efforts by us adults to turn the climate tide, in the end it would take a kind of kids’ crusade to shame us elders into changing our minds, hearts and habits, and with those shifts change the world. Now we find our kids and grandkids stepping up to the challenge. I’ve long felt we owe our children and their descendants a better world than we have thus far bequeathed them. We’ve eaten their breakfast, lunch and dinner and they’re left scavenging for scraps. Perhaps because a beloved daughter came to my wife and me late in our lives I feel an almost grandfatherly kinship with the millennial generation and a passion to do better on their behalf.
Not Revolution but Transformation
Many young people today, like those of us swept up in the Sixties rebellion, are united and ignited by a vague yearning for a “revolution” that in a sudden reversal of fortunes will sweep the country and produce a permanent change of direction. Unfortunately, little in American or world history supports this theory of social change. Revolutions have a way of taking us right back where we were before they began (as wheels tend to do) but with a counter-revolutionary vengeance inflicted by the elites who eventually regain command. One of the advantages of experience we can offer the idealists among succeeding generations to whom we Sixties revolutionaries bear such a striking resemblance is to temper their expectations and ours with a different theory of social change, based not on one-sided conquest but on the more patient, persevering task of reaching across to sometime adversaries and seeding the common ground between us.
Watching an exultant multicultural mix of youthful supporters animated by a shared passion for a more positive future, I’ve finally awakened to the realization that the kids may be right: the time for half-measures is over. Only boldness — confidence and determination fueled by an exuberant love of life— meets the temper of these times.
Yet I also believe that no enduring progress will be made unless and until we develop a broad-based movement for climate action and a green economy that includes key sectors and players we progressives routinely denounce, not least of all the captains of industry who must actually implement the changes we seek. And yes, even a few of the “better” billionaires many progressives so love to hate. You don’t need to love billionaires or even believe there should be any to realize that class war that condemns whole classes of individuals with widely varying histories, motivations and commitments locks us into a downward spiral that ends up benefiting only those who succeed by dividing us from one another. And it contradicts a primary value progressives claim as a guiding principle — to treat everyone equally and be inclusive rather than exclusionary in our choice of allies. This doesn’t mean one makes a pact with the devil but that, recognizing our own fallibility of judgment, we extend to others the respect they’re due if on balance their values and ours are more aligned than antagonistic.
We Save Ourselves By Saving Each Other
My candidate for president doesn’t appear on any ballot. That candidate is not a particular politician or even “none of the above.” S/he is quite simply “the rest of us.” You, me and we are the only ones who can beat back the despair that has gripped humanity like a paralyzing virus. No individual can save us because there simply are no solitary savoirs. We have met our saviors and they are us. We save ourselves by saving each other. Stepping into our own truths, we find we’re not alone there but surrounded by millions of others of like mind, be they of our own tribe or another. In this 911 moment we die or rise together. Our children know this best. Between their enthusiasm, energy and instinct for life and our sobering, hard-won wisdom of experience we meet in what the poet Rumi called “a field beyond wrongdoing and right doing” for a rendezvous with our common destiny. If at long last we come together we may yet bend the arc of history.
