Seize the Day
Image: A new youth led climate movement has big plans to occupy schools across the globe. Photo: Flickr.
Opinion by PETER HEHIR
A letter from a youth-led climate movement published in the Guardian yesterday morning; Tuesday the 26th of July, really made me wish that I was young again.
The group, who are calling themselves End Fossil: Occupy!, are organising a global movement to occupy schools across the world pushing for action on the climate crisis.
“It’s no secret that our enemy, the fossil fuel industry, rules the world. And it is far from falling; in fact, it is stronger than ever” the letter states.
Knowing what I know now and just how entrenched the fossil fuel lobby is, this letter made me sit bolt upright.
“Every generation blames the one before and all of their frustrations come beating on your door” are lyrics from ‘The Living Years’ by Mike + the Mechanics. But there isn’t any doubt that the baby boomers have taken fouling the nest to a whole new level.
Those of us who saw ‘The Graduate’ when it was released will remember Mr Robinson’s utterance to Benjamin Braddock – “Plastic”. Well his remark was indeed prophetic. Yet another by-product of the fossil fuel industry and the impact on the world has been monumental.
But not in a good way. Not the saviour of humanity, but ironically contributing significantly to the means of its demise.
Microplastics have reached every corner of the globe, from the depths of the oceans to the peak of Everest. It’s at the poles and in the food that we eat, the air that we breathe and in every ecosystem. It’s even used to make the tea bags that we never give a second thought to.
Think about that before you take another sip.
Protesting isn’t new. There have always been a tiny percentage of us who were aware, in spite of a media spewing out disinformation, and who selflessly gave their time and energy in an attempt to alter the mindset of the great mass of humanity who seemed to have accepted “that that’s just the way it is, that things will never change”.
But not according to Bruce Hornsby and the Range in their hit “The Way it is” who added “Ah, but don’t you believe them.”
Saving the planet was pretty low on the list of most people’s priorities.
“There were planes to catch and bills to pay” sang Harry Chapin in “Cat’s in the Cradle” – and a host of the essential day to day activities like shopping, taking the kids to school, or to sport meant leaving the problems of the world to those we elected to solve them.
What we couldn’t or wouldn’t realise is that the pollies didn’t see that task as part of their job description. Politics was a just a job. The object being to climb to the top of whatever tree you’d chosen. It didn’t matter who or what you did to get there.
The realisation that in order to do that, “you had to be all things to all men”. That was the key.
When I was young and naive enough to believe that politicians could and would actually effect change, it took me some time to come to the realisation that the key to being a successful politician was to not make a decision, but to simply create the impression that you’d done so.
That not deciding was the best decision they could possibly make.
To simply maintain the status quo was the order of business. If you changed things you’d upset somebody and lose their vote. So best to do nothing. The art was to appear to be doing something.
The idealism that initiated a career in politics was blunted by this realisation.
The brilliant British satire “Yes Minister” said it all. This was confirmed for me when our own Prime Minister Bob Hawke, a highly educated Rhodes scholar, uttered the absurd prophecy; “By 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty”.
