Addendum: This morning, I listened to the radio, and heard Greta Thunberg address the UN. Having lived through the Nuclear scare (notice nobody talks about all the armaments still out there, still as great a peril), and witnessed how people struggled for the ‘right’ title to attach to this crisis we must now fear, I have been skeptical. NOT skeptical that there are problems with how we live in the world. But life is change, and I can’t live fearful of ‘change,’ any more than I can embrace a movement that devolves into epithets of orthodoxy, Climate Activists reduced to spitting out ‘Climate Denier,’ usually indoors, in a human-controlled microclimate… I’ve felt mostly sad and cynical about the lionizing of Greta Thunberg. It seemed like a show and a distraction, and I could think of a lifetime of moments, when my own family members, without a platform, cried out. I could remember my brother’s despair, smart enough to see that he would not be heard…

It has been impossible to frame in words my frustration, that, in unexamined parrotting of one of the stories that got us into this mess, people run about looking for (or looking to be) a Messiah fit for the moment. Anyone who dies unlionized defending their love of life? Just not Messianic enough, I guess? We’d act, if only there were a good enough motivational speaker to lead us? 

Today, though, I heard this young woman speak my angry heart, calling out the generations (mine included) older than hers, for shoving the burden of ‘Hope’ upon their shoulders, and carrying straight on with prioritizing of money over life. How dare you? She seethed. And so, too, says my own heart. How dare we?! How dare we be so lazy, weak and selfish, all the while aggrandizing to ourselves the mantle of most important species?

Greta, in my kitchen, baking bread, listening to the radio, I ask this, too: How Dare We?

How dare we do other than live every moment in love and in awe of this World of Wonders, this Ceremony in which we are blessed to find ourselves? How dare we give up? How dare we not turn to each other now, and seek to connect again, knowing we are good enough for this task, as we are, here and now?