On Greta
What is your position on Universal Basic Income? If in favor why would you prefer Universal Basic Income over Universal Basic Assets? How about negative taxation? If you oppose UBI on what basis do you object, and what are you concerned about and for whom?
Is the world in the state it is because of unbridled capitalism or because capitalism is bridled? How much of the progressive movements and platforms are funded or subsidized by conservative hegemony? Where are your superannuation funds invested? Are they in an ethical fund? Does that fund use positive or negative screening processes? What is ethical? How is consumer activism effected by transfer frontiers? What is capitals obligation under the corporations act and which branch of government is responsible for reform?
Yesterday while washing dishes, I put on commercial free to air television (a highly recommend this, better than Netflix, but that's another post). At 2pm on channel 7 afternoon news program, they played a video recorded by Bjorn of Abba fame opining on Greta Thunberg.
It strikes me as fascinatingly insane. For the record I still haven't watched Greta's UN address. I've just been watching the coverage. Which is bad because my understanding of Greta's central complaint is that she isn't being listened to.
Just upfront, a lot of the facebook coverage on my feed, was at the positive end of the spectrum 'woohoo go Greta!' cheer-squad, and at the negative end of the spectrum was sharing the mansplainy articles 'why some angry men are triggered by Greta...' from the boo-squad.
'Triggered' is probably a good diagnosis of the people being criticized by these articles and by Bjorn Ulvaeus. Though I am not holding my breath that the boo-squad will come out in defense of Donald Trump when his appearance and penis size and body shape are constantly ridiculed by angry men on the internet like Seth Myers and Stephen Colbert, or telling lay people to knock off trying to diagnose Trump as pathological or having a narcissistic personality disorder. Nor do I hold my breath that it will now be regarded as fair game to dismiss someone posting online about their diagnosis of PTSD, and how difficult some daily activity is because of its triggering nature.
I'm sure the boo-squad doesn't believe it has a partisan double standard, but there's a clear rationale where Donald Trump is fair game because of his power and that he is a public figure, whereas a 16 year old girl with no particular qualifications has a TEDx talk with 2m views, and gets to address the UN delegates has no power and is just a schoolgirl with no agency, and thus not a public figure.
Even so, I agree, there's a bunch of perhaps mostly men, or views mostly vocalized by men, that are 'triggered' and committing mean spirited fallacies or crying cynical crocodile tears for her mental welfare. I don't particularly care about Greta's mental health, I'd be willing to bet, almost nobody sincerely does.
I can't tell if I'm empathizing or projecting my own adolescent experience onto Greta, but just because I and others are not truly sympathetic to the mental health risk posed to Greta by being the face of a global movement, doesn't mean those mental health risks don't exist.
For one thing, I see a lot of adults lauding Greta as their champion, their hero, where unless I'm grossly misinterpreting (or have to reserve the right to plead ignorance); Greta's core complaint is that she isn't able to be a child because the adults aren't taking care of the planet. That there's a lucid interpretation that Greta's story should have stopped in the class where she was taught about climate change because the teacher finished the lesson with 'But you can relax kids because we're handling it.'
So to me, there's probably an obvious risk of 'Covert Incest' but at some societal level, where it is Greta's cheer-squad and the angry-internet-males boo-squad are the primary potential contributors because they are the adults leaning collectively on a child to comfort and reassure them.
Now onto the meat of this post, I feel but have no proof that we live in an era where 'listening' has a very narrow definition. Which is to say, there is no independence between legitimate problems/concerns and legitimate solutions. By which I mean, for people to feel a complaint (specifically theirs) has been heard, it means the solution they proffer must be enacted. Eg. a waiter doesn't write down a customers order, and they forget they said no cheese on their enchiladas, and the customer complains and demands free meals for life from the restaurant. The customer has a legitimate complaint and an illegitimate remedy.
A tool I find useful, is to imagine a trial. The desired outcome of this trial is that justice is served. Now in life, sometimes you might be a defense attorney, trying to ensure your innocent client is not convicted of a crime they didn't commit. In other circumstances you may be the prosecuting attorney, where justice is served by ensuring the guilty defendant pays for his crimes.
In every case though, there are two paths to injustice, and this point I observe seems to not occur to most people. The first is that the other attorney is unscrupulous and cunning and through their extreme competence will successfully prosecute the innocent and defend the guilty. The other path to injustice is through your incompetent bumbling your innocent client gets convicted, or through your incompetent blundering a guilty party walks free. And without digging too deep into the analogy, there's all sorts of shit a lay person could do to fuck up a trial, like introducing evidence without discovery, unduly influencing a juror, or say asking the defendant to try on a pair of gloves found at the murder scene.
So there's a future, where 35 year old Greta is sitting in her living room, reading an article about how civilization was almost lost, because the Extinction movement sucked up all the oxygen around addressing climate change. A problem that was solved through investment and innovation in technology including nuclear reactors, where several countries tried to move towards centrally planned economies and disastrously increased their carbon footprints, inspired by Greta. A thorough and sober and lucid postmortem of that time that people rallied around a teenager's diagnosis of the problem and the solution that grew up around her.
Sure there's also a potential future where Greta is leader of the free world largely credited with inspiring and motivating the mass mobilization of the world's population to face down the existential threat of climate change.
But risk is calculated by the variance of outcomes, and much as today not too many people make noise about how great Justin Trudeau is given the black-face, brown-face and banking corruption stuff. Greta is unlikely to prove as hypocritical and shallow as Justin, but I put good money on Greta knowing about as much as I would expect a 16 year old who has missed a bunch of school to know about addressing climate change.
When I was younger, not Greta young, but mid-twenties, I was studying with the intention to become a financial adviser, on route to being my own ethical index fund manager. It got derailed as a plan for various reasons, but I remember stumbling across this particular conundrum...
Most people are financially illiterate. That's the basis of a financial planner, or financial adviser contributing value. However it dawned on me, that to really get value out of a financial planner, you need to be financially literate yourself, or your financial planner/advisor/accountant needs to be an excellent teacher to get you financially literate as a client (but then how do you know what you are being taught is real or part of a con). Perhaps my own earliest conception of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Just yesterday I was reading this article about the post GFC american housing situation and it had a chart at the bottom demonstrating an inverse relationship between rental yields and housing prices and thinking 'how many people do I know that can interpret this information?' and that's with the caveats of, I haven't fact checked the sources and studies, read the methodology, I'd never heard of this publication before, and basically that there's never been a harder time to make sense of the world than in the post internet era.
My feeling is, we have this 'customer is always right' paradigm that has invaded society, this I find interesting. Because many of the people railing against capitalism's psyche is a direct product of this very very capitalistic idea. We have been trained in most cases from birth, to not conceive of our own solutions but to accept the solutions marketed to us, and we do this with brands like Greta or Universal Basic Income. Capitalism is full of the 'fait accompli'
Again, keeping in mind I haven't watched Greta's UN address, because I'm not interested in the content remotely. But one of my friends linked to some coverage of it with the excerpt 'How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.' So I don't know if that's a verbatim quote or not.
But assuming it is, then this is bad journalism to focus in on that quote... Fuck it, I'm going to watch her address now... okay, I think Greta and I agree that she shouldn't be there. I was surprised that it's only a few minutes long, and not in the good way like the Gettysburg address, but in a way that makes me perplexed at how a speech with so little content could generate so much press and praise and criticism.
It's a pretty terrible speech, however given the polarization of society and the abandonment of community, half of the partisan population will immediately recognize how terrible the speech is, and the other half is incapable of recognizing that the speech is terrible, because it contains their thoughts spoken aloud.
Again I don't know if I can empathize with Greta or am merely just projecting, but the general impression I get is that the rule is 'if you've listened to Greta then you must agree with her, wholesale.' otherwise you aren't listening.
And that comes from I suspect, growing up being bombarded with this capitalist materialist message that all our problems can be solved, and that we don't have to solve them ourselves, we just have to consume. Otherwise known as advertising. This is my suspicion, and we aren't, as lay people, particularly well equipped for this mindset of: working in order to consume easy fixes because everything is dedicated to our satisfaction, might create it's own problems, such as climate change.
So who stole Greta's childhood? Was it the current incumbent politicians? Some vast conspiracy of politicians over the last 30 years? Was it the neo-cons? (Reagan through Bush) or the neo-liberals?(Clinton-Blaire-Obama). Was it FDR speaking of the four freedoms, including the freedom from want? Or was it pig iron Bob Menzies, thinking the way to fight communism was to encourage home ownership in Australia? If we plugged Greta into a global political leadership role, would her integrity shine through or would she find herself bound by obligations and quid pro quos and trade deals and treaties and demands from her constituents to pack all their groceries into one bag and for that bag not to be heavy? Do we need reform to unshackle our politicians so they can do what in their heart they feel is right? What if that unshackled politician is Donald Trump?
And what actually needs remedying? Is it bridled or unbridled capitalism? Do free markets need to be reigned in, or do markets need to be set free? Or do we need to declare capitalism dead and implement a working socialism? Have we become unstuck because the experts and elites have been lying to the general public that has lain dormant? Or have we become unstuck because the non-expert public is too involved in public life and experts can't implement top-down solutions?
The one thing I'm confident of, is that were I to interview Greta or any other 16 year old, the odds that they would be able to answer any of these questions is practically 0, or it would quickly be revealed that they are a 16 year old child that has little practice at second or third or fourth order thinking. Even given a child prodigy, I'd still rather talk to the expert that is a child prodigy 40 years later, with emotional maturity and life experience.
Alain De Botton offers alternative poles of analysis than just the left-right, which is almost meaningless these days to me. I like his breakdown of Romantic-Classical poles, where the vast majority of people are Romantic-thinkers, and a tiny minority Classical.
One characteristic particularly relevant to the coverage of Greta, is that Romantic thinkers tend to believe there is somebody specific to blame. Bad people that we could remove and fix everything. (and particularly prone to having no interest in the abysmal history of revolutions).
So I ask myself, what would all these people do cheering on Greta or booing the angry white men, if we just removed the white men to blame from the equation? Presume that bulwark or obstacle to mobilization is out of the way. What's the next step?
Do these people confront the massive restructuring of their daily lives? And it isn't the stuff people have embraced: reusing their grey water to maintain the garden, eating a plant based diet, installing solar panels on their roof, and riding a bike to work. All good things.
I mean, losing your job and defaulting on your mortgage, your house plunging into negative equity, declaring bankruptcy and having no credit. Dealing with Austerity budgets and the collapse of funding for the arts and community services, food shortages, and worse, popular uprisings.
I wonder these things, because I see. I see people post shit booing our politicians for their inaction on climate change, and then those self same people posting about their upcoming international holidays, short term, and completely discretionary. (I noticed these things because I felt terrible flying a return trip to Australia from Mexico to attend a friends' wedding last year, one of the things that made me feel better was judgmental comparison to how many and how frequently my friends take international holidays. Some take 4 separate holidays a year.)
Greta urges the people who stole her dreams and childhood to confront uncomfortable facts, one thing I would urge my people to confront is that less people are 'on-board' climate action than claim.
I suspect most people are actually just self interested, they want to go about with their daily lives, their dreams and prolonged childhoods and not have the mob descend on them. They will embrace solutions so long as they are low-cost and high benefit, namely confer social status, by being vegan or some other form of conspicuous consumption like keep-cups or a tote bag for a local food co-op. They will pay $1 but not $10. In which case the environment is an incidental beneficiary. All the while assuming that somewhere out there, there are fat disgusting old white men chewing on cigars that will have to make all the actual sacrifices, and get lynched justly for fucking up the planet, with little consideration that they distribute their wealth out to us via investment to become their income via our custom and borrowing from our future selves.
We live in a world where we will give not a few minutes, but hours upon hours of coverage to a divisive figure like Greta, who has an opinion but no real content, because I suspect she is a 16 year old girl, and a large contingent of people want her to succeed with the same degree of non-expertise as the large contingent of people who are "triggered" by her because of who she is, not the content of her character (or largely content-less speeches) but it's extremely hard to get anyone listening to a middle aged white man that has really looked hard and deeply at the problems and solutions:
It's possible because we can't very well blame privileged white men for the state of the world and look to privileged white men for the solutions. It could also be because of who the speakers hold responsible. Greta and the Extinction movement has the benefit of the hand washing exercise of Romantic blaming. Someone else did it to us, let's muster a posse to round em up n lynch them. Problem solved. The other says YOU, YOU are dragging your feet and your behavior betrays your professed public sentiments.
I'm optimistic about the climate, and I hope Greta can gracefully transition back to a private citizen with minimal damage, free to pursue her personal happiness. Which is to say, I hope her central complaint is addressed. But having now actually watched her mercifully short address at the UN, I totally understand why a lot of people dislike her and why a lot of people don't understand why those people dislike her. Alas my strongest and most negative reaction was to the people who cheered her, and the two people sitting to her right that are nodding approvingly, because they seem to not realize that Greta is talking about them, about you, about all the adults. ALL the adults.
I confess, I no longer know what an adult is. I haven't done my research and that's a discussion for another day.
Is the world in the state it is because of unbridled capitalism or because capitalism is bridled? How much of the progressive movements and platforms are funded or subsidized by conservative hegemony? Where are your superannuation funds invested? Are they in an ethical fund? Does that fund use positive or negative screening processes? What is ethical? How is consumer activism effected by transfer frontiers? What is capitals obligation under the corporations act and which branch of government is responsible for reform?
Yesterday while washing dishes, I put on commercial free to air television (a highly recommend this, better than Netflix, but that's another post). At 2pm on channel 7 afternoon news program, they played a video recorded by Bjorn of Abba fame opining on Greta Thunberg.
It strikes me as fascinatingly insane. For the record I still haven't watched Greta's UN address. I've just been watching the coverage. Which is bad because my understanding of Greta's central complaint is that she isn't being listened to.
Just upfront, a lot of the facebook coverage on my feed, was at the positive end of the spectrum 'woohoo go Greta!' cheer-squad, and at the negative end of the spectrum was sharing the mansplainy articles 'why some angry men are triggered by Greta...' from the boo-squad.
'Triggered' is probably a good diagnosis of the people being criticized by these articles and by Bjorn Ulvaeus. Though I am not holding my breath that the boo-squad will come out in defense of Donald Trump when his appearance and penis size and body shape are constantly ridiculed by angry men on the internet like Seth Myers and Stephen Colbert, or telling lay people to knock off trying to diagnose Trump as pathological or having a narcissistic personality disorder. Nor do I hold my breath that it will now be regarded as fair game to dismiss someone posting online about their diagnosis of PTSD, and how difficult some daily activity is because of its triggering nature.
I'm sure the boo-squad doesn't believe it has a partisan double standard, but there's a clear rationale where Donald Trump is fair game because of his power and that he is a public figure, whereas a 16 year old girl with no particular qualifications has a TEDx talk with 2m views, and gets to address the UN delegates has no power and is just a schoolgirl with no agency, and thus not a public figure.
Even so, I agree, there's a bunch of perhaps mostly men, or views mostly vocalized by men, that are 'triggered' and committing mean spirited fallacies or crying cynical crocodile tears for her mental welfare. I don't particularly care about Greta's mental health, I'd be willing to bet, almost nobody sincerely does.
I can't tell if I'm empathizing or projecting my own adolescent experience onto Greta, but just because I and others are not truly sympathetic to the mental health risk posed to Greta by being the face of a global movement, doesn't mean those mental health risks don't exist.
For one thing, I see a lot of adults lauding Greta as their champion, their hero, where unless I'm grossly misinterpreting (or have to reserve the right to plead ignorance); Greta's core complaint is that she isn't able to be a child because the adults aren't taking care of the planet. That there's a lucid interpretation that Greta's story should have stopped in the class where she was taught about climate change because the teacher finished the lesson with 'But you can relax kids because we're handling it.'
So to me, there's probably an obvious risk of 'Covert Incest' but at some societal level, where it is Greta's cheer-squad and the angry-internet-males boo-squad are the primary potential contributors because they are the adults leaning collectively on a child to comfort and reassure them.
Now onto the meat of this post, I feel but have no proof that we live in an era where 'listening' has a very narrow definition. Which is to say, there is no independence between legitimate problems/concerns and legitimate solutions. By which I mean, for people to feel a complaint (specifically theirs) has been heard, it means the solution they proffer must be enacted. Eg. a waiter doesn't write down a customers order, and they forget they said no cheese on their enchiladas, and the customer complains and demands free meals for life from the restaurant. The customer has a legitimate complaint and an illegitimate remedy.
A tool I find useful, is to imagine a trial. The desired outcome of this trial is that justice is served. Now in life, sometimes you might be a defense attorney, trying to ensure your innocent client is not convicted of a crime they didn't commit. In other circumstances you may be the prosecuting attorney, where justice is served by ensuring the guilty defendant pays for his crimes.
In every case though, there are two paths to injustice, and this point I observe seems to not occur to most people. The first is that the other attorney is unscrupulous and cunning and through their extreme competence will successfully prosecute the innocent and defend the guilty. The other path to injustice is through your incompetent bumbling your innocent client gets convicted, or through your incompetent blundering a guilty party walks free. And without digging too deep into the analogy, there's all sorts of shit a lay person could do to fuck up a trial, like introducing evidence without discovery, unduly influencing a juror, or say asking the defendant to try on a pair of gloves found at the murder scene.
So there's a future, where 35 year old Greta is sitting in her living room, reading an article about how civilization was almost lost, because the Extinction movement sucked up all the oxygen around addressing climate change. A problem that was solved through investment and innovation in technology including nuclear reactors, where several countries tried to move towards centrally planned economies and disastrously increased their carbon footprints, inspired by Greta. A thorough and sober and lucid postmortem of that time that people rallied around a teenager's diagnosis of the problem and the solution that grew up around her.
Sure there's also a potential future where Greta is leader of the free world largely credited with inspiring and motivating the mass mobilization of the world's population to face down the existential threat of climate change.
But risk is calculated by the variance of outcomes, and much as today not too many people make noise about how great Justin Trudeau is given the black-face, brown-face and banking corruption stuff. Greta is unlikely to prove as hypocritical and shallow as Justin, but I put good money on Greta knowing about as much as I would expect a 16 year old who has missed a bunch of school to know about addressing climate change.
When I was younger, not Greta young, but mid-twenties, I was studying with the intention to become a financial adviser, on route to being my own ethical index fund manager. It got derailed as a plan for various reasons, but I remember stumbling across this particular conundrum...
Most people are financially illiterate. That's the basis of a financial planner, or financial adviser contributing value. However it dawned on me, that to really get value out of a financial planner, you need to be financially literate yourself, or your financial planner/advisor/accountant needs to be an excellent teacher to get you financially literate as a client (but then how do you know what you are being taught is real or part of a con). Perhaps my own earliest conception of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Just yesterday I was reading this article about the post GFC american housing situation and it had a chart at the bottom demonstrating an inverse relationship between rental yields and housing prices and thinking 'how many people do I know that can interpret this information?' and that's with the caveats of, I haven't fact checked the sources and studies, read the methodology, I'd never heard of this publication before, and basically that there's never been a harder time to make sense of the world than in the post internet era.
My feeling is, we have this 'customer is always right' paradigm that has invaded society, this I find interesting. Because many of the people railing against capitalism's psyche is a direct product of this very very capitalistic idea. We have been trained in most cases from birth, to not conceive of our own solutions but to accept the solutions marketed to us, and we do this with brands like Greta or Universal Basic Income. Capitalism is full of the 'fait accompli'
Again, keeping in mind I haven't watched Greta's UN address, because I'm not interested in the content remotely. But one of my friends linked to some coverage of it with the excerpt 'How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.' So I don't know if that's a verbatim quote or not.
But assuming it is, then this is bad journalism to focus in on that quote... Fuck it, I'm going to watch her address now... okay, I think Greta and I agree that she shouldn't be there. I was surprised that it's only a few minutes long, and not in the good way like the Gettysburg address, but in a way that makes me perplexed at how a speech with so little content could generate so much press and praise and criticism.
It's a pretty terrible speech, however given the polarization of society and the abandonment of community, half of the partisan population will immediately recognize how terrible the speech is, and the other half is incapable of recognizing that the speech is terrible, because it contains their thoughts spoken aloud.
Again I don't know if I can empathize with Greta or am merely just projecting, but the general impression I get is that the rule is 'if you've listened to Greta then you must agree with her, wholesale.' otherwise you aren't listening.
And that comes from I suspect, growing up being bombarded with this capitalist materialist message that all our problems can be solved, and that we don't have to solve them ourselves, we just have to consume. Otherwise known as advertising. This is my suspicion, and we aren't, as lay people, particularly well equipped for this mindset of: working in order to consume easy fixes because everything is dedicated to our satisfaction, might create it's own problems, such as climate change.
So who stole Greta's childhood? Was it the current incumbent politicians? Some vast conspiracy of politicians over the last 30 years? Was it the neo-cons? (Reagan through Bush) or the neo-liberals?(Clinton-Blaire-Obama). Was it FDR speaking of the four freedoms, including the freedom from want? Or was it pig iron Bob Menzies, thinking the way to fight communism was to encourage home ownership in Australia? If we plugged Greta into a global political leadership role, would her integrity shine through or would she find herself bound by obligations and quid pro quos and trade deals and treaties and demands from her constituents to pack all their groceries into one bag and for that bag not to be heavy? Do we need reform to unshackle our politicians so they can do what in their heart they feel is right? What if that unshackled politician is Donald Trump?
And what actually needs remedying? Is it bridled or unbridled capitalism? Do free markets need to be reigned in, or do markets need to be set free? Or do we need to declare capitalism dead and implement a working socialism? Have we become unstuck because the experts and elites have been lying to the general public that has lain dormant? Or have we become unstuck because the non-expert public is too involved in public life and experts can't implement top-down solutions?
The one thing I'm confident of, is that were I to interview Greta or any other 16 year old, the odds that they would be able to answer any of these questions is practically 0, or it would quickly be revealed that they are a 16 year old child that has little practice at second or third or fourth order thinking. Even given a child prodigy, I'd still rather talk to the expert that is a child prodigy 40 years later, with emotional maturity and life experience.
Alain De Botton offers alternative poles of analysis than just the left-right, which is almost meaningless these days to me. I like his breakdown of Romantic-Classical poles, where the vast majority of people are Romantic-thinkers, and a tiny minority Classical.
One characteristic particularly relevant to the coverage of Greta, is that Romantic thinkers tend to believe there is somebody specific to blame. Bad people that we could remove and fix everything. (and particularly prone to having no interest in the abysmal history of revolutions).
So I ask myself, what would all these people do cheering on Greta or booing the angry white men, if we just removed the white men to blame from the equation? Presume that bulwark or obstacle to mobilization is out of the way. What's the next step?
Do these people confront the massive restructuring of their daily lives? And it isn't the stuff people have embraced: reusing their grey water to maintain the garden, eating a plant based diet, installing solar panels on their roof, and riding a bike to work. All good things.
I mean, losing your job and defaulting on your mortgage, your house plunging into negative equity, declaring bankruptcy and having no credit. Dealing with Austerity budgets and the collapse of funding for the arts and community services, food shortages, and worse, popular uprisings.
I wonder these things, because I see. I see people post shit booing our politicians for their inaction on climate change, and then those self same people posting about their upcoming international holidays, short term, and completely discretionary. (I noticed these things because I felt terrible flying a return trip to Australia from Mexico to attend a friends' wedding last year, one of the things that made me feel better was judgmental comparison to how many and how frequently my friends take international holidays. Some take 4 separate holidays a year.)
Greta urges the people who stole her dreams and childhood to confront uncomfortable facts, one thing I would urge my people to confront is that less people are 'on-board' climate action than claim.
I suspect most people are actually just self interested, they want to go about with their daily lives, their dreams and prolonged childhoods and not have the mob descend on them. They will embrace solutions so long as they are low-cost and high benefit, namely confer social status, by being vegan or some other form of conspicuous consumption like keep-cups or a tote bag for a local food co-op. They will pay $1 but not $10. In which case the environment is an incidental beneficiary. All the while assuming that somewhere out there, there are fat disgusting old white men chewing on cigars that will have to make all the actual sacrifices, and get lynched justly for fucking up the planet, with little consideration that they distribute their wealth out to us via investment to become their income via our custom and borrowing from our future selves.
We live in a world where we will give not a few minutes, but hours upon hours of coverage to a divisive figure like Greta, who has an opinion but no real content, because I suspect she is a 16 year old girl, and a large contingent of people want her to succeed with the same degree of non-expertise as the large contingent of people who are "triggered" by her because of who she is, not the content of her character (or largely content-less speeches) but it's extremely hard to get anyone listening to a middle aged white man that has really looked hard and deeply at the problems and solutions:
It's possible because we can't very well blame privileged white men for the state of the world and look to privileged white men for the solutions. It could also be because of who the speakers hold responsible. Greta and the Extinction movement has the benefit of the hand washing exercise of Romantic blaming. Someone else did it to us, let's muster a posse to round em up n lynch them. Problem solved. The other says YOU, YOU are dragging your feet and your behavior betrays your professed public sentiments.
I'm optimistic about the climate, and I hope Greta can gracefully transition back to a private citizen with minimal damage, free to pursue her personal happiness. Which is to say, I hope her central complaint is addressed. But having now actually watched her mercifully short address at the UN, I totally understand why a lot of people dislike her and why a lot of people don't understand why those people dislike her. Alas my strongest and most negative reaction was to the people who cheered her, and the two people sitting to her right that are nodding approvingly, because they seem to not realize that Greta is talking about them, about you, about all the adults. ALL the adults.
I confess, I no longer know what an adult is. I haven't done my research and that's a discussion for another day.
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