Our Future is Your Footnote
Leaders lack the guts to pick up the fire hose
I’m 41 and lie awake at night with fear. Plain fear and much rage. My little daughter and my autistic son tried tirelessly to be heard today, in Aachen at the so far biggest climate crisis demo in Germany. We and tens of thousands of others. Many more couldn’t be there, or didn’t want to be there, because they can’t face reality yet.
And we all come home to which news?
The EU AGAIN makes our future a literal footnote.
The ladies and gentlemen EU politicians AGAIN didn’t manage to even WANT TO tackle the fire raging in this house we all live in. I’m not even saying “to put out” – that is a global effort of all people involved. But the will to even pick up the fire hose and seriously start seems to be absent in these air-conditioned offices.
God, you are so weak.
The house is burning – next week with near 40 degrees, record after record – and nobody ACTS. The facts are on the table – but nobody starts. The people, the children and their allies, the seeing, take to the streets and demonstrate, do petitions, rage. But no.
The kids are begging FOR THEIR LIVES – and are ignored.
One can really get mad, get angry; one has to panic. Greta is right: I want you to panic; I want you to feel the same panic I feel every day.
But unfortunately the seemingly wrong people are in panic. I am scared. My children are scared. They don’t understand how you can calmly go on destroying their habitat. How you can watch the climate meltdown, the plastic floods, the extinction of species. How you can time and time again postpone to put out the fire on this burning planet that is the house of all of us, and which is THEIR future, no longer yours.
It is unfathomable.
I can’t sleep. And for the first time in my life I am desperate; I can’t be soothed by the optimists around me. Because optimism is no longer right. YOU should panic too.
YOU MESSED THIS UP. Again. Irreversibly. Ignoring the needs and demands of the children in your families, of the generations to come. You’ll be dead, and they won’t be able to pull the chestnut that is this planet out of YOUR fire.
But doesn’t matter, eh?
First there’s posts to barter away. Corporations to protect. Singular interests against that of the masses. First, there’s business as usual. You stay idle in the face of the magnitude of this problem.
It’s just children. It’s just our habitat.
They’ll somehow manage without insects, without clean oceans, without ice sheets and reasonable temperatures.
Postponers. Someone at some point will have an idea. Someone with courage. With power. With guts.
You don’t have all that. You’re messing it up – for good.
But it is US who lie awake at night, WE have to answer our kids’ questions. I don’t have an air-conditioned office that protects me from this feverish world, from kids’ questions, and from fear.
Because it will be too late – this is what I believe. You will not tackle nor manage this crisis. But telling this to my kids … I shouldn’t do that.
What I do tell them is: Who is to blame. Who is responsible, but doesn’t act. YOU THERE. You were so proud of your regulation against plastic straws. That is just as cute as my kids with their bamboo toothbrushes. My children stand there with their proudly bought bamboo brushes and believe it’s a small way to put out the fire in this burning house.
The evil truth is: NO, it isn’t.
No plastic straw less and no bamboo brush more can now save our planet.
The fire hose is in YOUR HANDS.
So for f-’s sake finally start using it.
Comments (0)