The tension in the air was palpable. All the representatives of power – politicians, diplomats and corporate leaders – could see and hear the assembly of youth in front of them. The whole world was watching as young people stepped up, stood tall and condemned decisions of the day. They decried blatant abuse of that power and they shouted to the representatives of the establishment to change their ways.
“How dare you!” they shouted, in so many words.
However, it wasn’t climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who shouted those words this past Monday at the United Nations that I’m talking about. No. The “How dare you!” slogan from long ago wasn’t about lack of action on climate change. It was a demonstration in front of the U.S. consulate on University Avenue in Toronto in May of 1970. The object of youth wrath then wasn’t global warming, but the endless, senseless, relentless war in Vietnam. And those at the demo shouted a different kind of “How dare you!”
“Give peace a chance,” was one slogan the anti-war youth shouted then. And “Hell no! We won’t go!” proclaimed by those dodging the U.S. Army draft. And though the times and topics were different, the sentiment was the same as Thunberg’s “How dare you!”
Those with the power to stop the destruction and bloodshed couldn’t see that the youth of the day were paying the price for the folly of their parents’ territorial politics.
I know, because I was there in front of the consulate that May 11 afternoon in 1970. There were some pretty strong voices there – Communist Party members, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc. – but the majority of them, the student members of the May 4 Movement (named in memory of the students shot at Kent State just a week earlier) wanted the bombing and killing in Vietnam to stop. But the cause got lost in the violence, when the demo got out of hand. The police arrived on horseback. People got trampled. Shops on Yonge Street sustained damage and the message of “Make peace not war” was lost.
Greta Thunberg’s passionate speech outside the UN headquarters in New York on Monday has resonated with me and should resonate for others of my generation of outspoken youth from the 1960s and ’70s. While we took to the streets to demand an end to war, we have failed to follow through.
War over territory, religious hatred, oil, genocide has not receded. It has escalated. And those of us who marched in the streets in the’60s and ’70s, later blithely marched to our gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs driving up the production of oil and gas. We moved to the country, turning our backs on the real problems of city cores. We craved the chance to get ahead, and ignored the cost to the environment of our consumerism, materialism and waste.
“People are dying. Entire eco-systems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction,” Thunberg scolded, last Monday. “And all you can talk about is the money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Yes. Scientists have rung the alarm bells for the past 30 years about the threat of global warming to civilization. Sometimes they’ve presented their findings in a silo or have been muzzled by climate-change deniers (such as President Trump). But more often than not, we who’ve had our hands on the controls of society as adults have not given them ink or air time to verify.
We’ve drowned out their truth with calls to accumulate more wealth, instead of applying prosperity bucks in the search of greener forms of transportation (electric cars), construction (energy-neutral housing) and cultivation (less meat and more plant consumption). And we’ve allowed hardliners on the environment – the coal belt in the U.S., Brazilian authorities burning down the Amazon rain forest, and the fossil-fuel producers in Canada the Middle East – to run green-energy conservationists out of town on a rail.
Well, Thunberg won’t stand for it.
“You are failing us,” she said at the UN. “But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say, we will never forgive you.”
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres gave Thunberg ample platform for her rant. He has demanded that those attending the UN Climate Change Summit in New York this week, be concise and offer concrete solutions, not platitudes and posturing. He commented that, “There is a cost to everything. But the biggest cost is doing nothing.” Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg isn’t going away. She arrives in Canada tomorrow, to join like-minded young people in Montreal for a nationwide climate strike.
If we, their parents and grandparents (the ones she is calling out for inaction) refuse her now, the war, pestilence and hate we protested against a generation ago will be the least of our worries.