Poor Greta, she’s convinced she has no future. She lives in Sweden, one of the most prosperous nations on earth with wealth and modern conveniences most of the world’s children can’t even imagine. But she realized the world is doomed when she learned about climate change. At age 11, she revealed in a Ted Talk, she became depressed, stopped eating and talking, and fell ill. “In two months, I lost about ten kilos of weight. Later on I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, OCD and selective mutism – that basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary.”
It’s easy enough and true enough to say that the powerful political forces of the anthropogenic global warming command-and-control-junkies are using this tortured young person in an obscene display of child abuse. But look deeper – what happens when a young people by the millions believe Greta’s charge that their elders have “stolen” their “dreams and childhood?”
It’s us she blames for killing her future – her parents and grandparents. It’s no joke when this 16-year-old, her face contorted in anger, galvanizes millions of other children around the world to march as she warns the older generation as well as the dignitaries at the UN Climate Action Summit: “We are watching you.”
She blames us grown-ups for the international eco-apocalypse she is convinced we are bringing down on her generation and she is furious, claiming that “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money…”
Collapsing ecosystems? Mass extinction? These are deadly, dangerously exaggerated accusations to lie at the feet of the world’s older generation; accusations that can lead to ugly conflict between the generations. And her personal fury is just the beginning. Little Greta isn’t sitting in her bedroom recording a podcast that will reach only 50 of her school pals. Her microphone is worldwide. Her voice is echoing, not only in the halls of the UN, but to millions of kids around the world who revere this grim little saviorette as their heroine.
Kids by the millions heeded her call for a global #climatestrike, emptying schools which have been indoctrinating as “science” climate models that have been proven laughably inaccurate in the 13 years since the dire predictions of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
The hopelessness and misdirected anger of Greta and her millions of acolytes have consequences way beyond banning straws, steaks and SUV’s. What happens when a couple of generations of children actually believe their lives will end painfully and very soon?
Is their despair linked to teen suicide rates that keep climbing across America? Is this why more and more of our kids are numbing themselves out with increasingly “legal” and highly potent marijuana, as well as deadly opiates? Our birth and marriage rates have dropped and mere children are signing pledges vowing not to have kids. And why indeed would they have children when the world will be destroyed before their offspring are even toddlers? How long before these millions of children terrorized by climate end-of-the-world predictions act out with hunger strikes, or, God forbid, mass suicide? Or how long before they report their parents to the authorities for insufficient recycling, or too-frequent carbon-polluting airplane flights?
Even in the glittering and famously leftist bastion of Aspen, Colorado, parents are becoming alarmed at what climate alarmism is doing to their kids. According to an article in the Aspen Times, several conservative parents at the School District Board meeting after the Thunberg-inspired September Global Climate Strike March, objected to their children being taught left-leaning climate politics.
Though the District claimed it wasn’t ”associated” with the march, the date was the same as the global protests. During the weeks leading up to the event, students took school time to make banners for the march and posed for a group photo. Students were prepped by the film “Explorer: Bill Nye’s Global Meltdown” which proclaims the world will end by 2030 because of temperature increases. Over 400 middle and high school children attended the march to downtown Aspen, and upset parents said teachers also participated, even leading chants.
The parents said the schools’ championing environmental stewardship is one thing, but “the doomsday prognostication created a stir with their children, who were upset and distraught.”
“I don’t think anybody here can or will say the Earth is going to end in 12 years,” one parent said. “So why in the hell are we telling these kids that, and basically giving them no reason to live? Why did we have a College Fair last weekend? If that’s the case, there’s no reason to go. We shouldn’t even be here.”
“What drives this agenda?” another parent asked. “What is the true agenda? Is the agenda really climate change? I’d say no. The agenda is against capitalism. Climate change is a way to get there, to fight capitalism and get to the socialist narrative. Why are the teachers driving this?”
Another parent said students who didn’t participate were bullied, while others were made to feel uncomfortable. “Just last week the mother of a high schooler told me her son had rocks thrown at him and was called a fascist for not participating in the walkout,” the parent said. “My (child) came to me in tears the night before the climate event because (the child) didn’t know how to feel or what to do because the school had made the picture sound so ‘fun.’”
The parents — whose names the paper doesn’t identify because they said their children have been distraught and in some cases bullied because of their differing opinions — said the climate change viewpoints have been extreme and don’t belong in a school setting when a counterpoint is not offered.
Predictably, school officials said “the community” should figure out how to “dialogue respectfully.” Actually, the community should figure out how to banish the dangerous bogeyman of climate mythology that is seriously threatening the mental health and the futures of our kids, not the future of our planet.