So, the Swedish girl being given all the headlines got up in a speech claiming that “we” “stole her childhood” and got all indignant.
Oh, please. She has no clue how good she has it. Now, I don’t blame her. She’s been carefully groomed and indoctrinated. People have played on her self-admitted Asbergers, giving her something of a passion to be fanatical about and pointing her in the direction they wanted her to go. She’s being used by people who do not have her best interest at heart but for their own self serving ends (and, yes, I include her parents in that).
As for stealing her childhood? I grew up with Vietnam, the Cold War, with two countries aiming enough missiles at each other that, as Albert Einstein was reported to say, “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with stones and spears.”
I grew up with predictions of imminent nuclear Armageddon. That’s in addition to the various ecological and environmental disasters that were going to bring about the end of the world. Paul Erlich was saying the fight against global starvation was already over. Worldwide famines could no longer be avoided. Air pollution was going to require all of us to wear gas masks by 1980 (1980!). Then there was Vietnam and the disaster that was the Tet Offensive. (Well, yes, it was. But not for us.) Oh, and not to forget the AIDS epidemic. We were doomed! Doomed, I tell you!
Then there was my parent’s generation. They had the Cuban Missile Crisis. Duck and Cover drills. (Yep, that old “Nuclear Armageddon” thing.) The Red Scare. Polio. And a little fracas called World War II.
Oh, and their parents. The Great Depression. World War I. The Spanish Flu.
Their parents? More worldwide epidemics. War as an endemic condition. And, frankly, a standard of living even among the middle and upper classes of the then developed world that someone like Greta Thunberg would consider, if she stopped to think about it, to be poverty more crushing than anything in her experience.
And, somehow, all of us in all these various generations facing all these real, not imagined terrors and disasters managed to have childhoods but Greta, Thunburg, fed some scare scenarios about “global warming” has hers stolen from her? I don’t think so.
And, no, I don’t really blame her. She’s just doing what the adults around her want her to do. She’s doing what gets her not just attention (which can be all important to a 16 year old even without adding Asbergers to the mix), but what is for her positive attention. She is being cynically used as a human/child shield to deflect criticism and challenge. I’m not buying it.
I mean, Angry Swedish Girl is angry so we’re supposed to drop everything and conform to her no-doubt heartfelt but ill-informed rants?
Well color me unimpressed.
The Writer in Black 