4
She didn’t respond right away. He couldn’t tell if she was waiting to make sure he’d expelled every last drop of himself, or if she was just looking for another shrub to disappear into as she shed the clingwrap of his codependency. Though, when he caught a glimpse out of the corner of his glistened periphery, all he saw was the empathetic gaze of someone who truly understood exactly how he was feeling, and he found it strangely comforting to know that at least one of them did.
“Oh sweetie, I understand exactly how you’re feeling. It’s tough, I know, and nothing out in that world makes it any easier, they only provide the illusion of convenience as a mechanism of tightening their stranglehold on humanity’s future. So try try try as you might, but trying never got anything done short of a lynching, and we’ve now entered the age of getting shit done.
So what can you do? You can do what feels right. You can find passion and a sense of purpose among an infinite number of ways to fight on the frontlines of our socio-ecological crisis, or what one might even call, the great convenience war.
Those folks back there were doing it, risking arrest even, and sacrificing their saturday morning cartoons to feed the people they saw starving in the streets of their community. And the community saw them. Sure, most people walked right by with about as much notice as a sub-prime foreclosure, but the people that were ready to be inspired, were. Sure inspired the hell outta us, didn’t it?
So find your heart, your way to fill the world with perpetual love, you just gotta find your niche. If you wanna feed the people, then feed the people. If you wanna house the people, house the people. If you wanna stop violent energy extraction on stolen indigenous lands, then by all means, get to it already. If you wanna sit on the couch and flip through channels that you don’t even like, while you take pride that you sent ten bucks to Greenpeace, then at least do that. Or if you wanna take on the biggest and baddest of them all, if you wanna help topple the ivory towers and bring liberation back to the garden, then all you gotta do is start living that with every step you take, the rest will all fall into place as it’s meant to.
And if you want to do all of the above, all while finding your own flavor of living in a good way, then do that. And walk the talk. And through your actions will sprout a trail of inspiration, as those who feel just as lost as you do right now, catch a glimpse of light through the darkness that’s consuming the world around them.
Like this plastic I picked up. I know I’m never gonna be able to get it all, but I carry the mindset that me seeing it, is the same as me putting it there, which is easy once you’ve traded your individual privilege for a broader sense of personal responsibility, and my style of meandering the maze is sure to rub off on a few of the onlookers along the way. I mean, it’s working on you, itn’t?”
He had no argument there, and shot her a look that confirmed the accusation, so she continued.
“And it’s worked on others, and then I’ve seen them inspire more people, and you will too, and with what started as just one person living her truth, can spread and evolve and grow into a planetful of plastic pickers learning to live in a good way.
Waking up is a process, and those first few steps out of the warm cocoon of all you’ve ever known can be a little scary. It seems like a cold cruel world from that shattered perspective, but with each step towards life outside the bubble, comes a greater sense of belonging there. Then as you become more comfortable with the crisp morning air, you find that your actions keep you warmer than the wool pulled over your eyes, and before you know it, the sun has risen to spread light into the shadows, and you wonder why it was that you ever hesitated in the first place.
But nobody’s got it all figured out yet, and some are a little more clueless than the others, it’s got nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with conditioning, so sometimes you have to take baby steps. Ease them into a new way of thinking with just a few kernels of their unpopped potential and let them bloom from there. You can’t come right out of the gate with all the nonsense we’ve been going on about with just anybody, I knew you were down as soon as you walked up, but any normal person, no offense, would now pronounce us lunatics and have us committed for life.
Or maybe a lot of it they even agree with, but they’re so far down the rabbit hole of defeatism, that they’ve lost any sense of personal power. See, that’s what people don’t get about this unwanted responsibility of helping some other person’s planet, not only is it their planet too, but they also gain this incredible authority to take the reins of the world around themselves and sculpt it into a better place. They have to remember that every widespread movement of change, started as one person’s narrowspread movement of change, they simply planted seeds along the way, and before they knew it, an entire forest stood tall and strong and unstoppable.
And one person can do a whole helluva lot with a little unbreakable determination, I mean, just look at Greta Thunberg.”
“Who?”
“Are you kidding me? Where have you been living, under a rock?”
It had certainly felt like it at times. He used to keep current on the events of the world, chasing links of environmental collapse, reading articles of how our clothing is really made, and our food. He even tuned into the five o’clock fear factor that reliably failed to report on anything of any pertinence, except of course for the latest scandal hitting the political theater that he’d long ago suspended any belief in. Keeping up on what was going down had only driven him further into madness. So many terrible things hitting him from every angle, and no one doing anything about them, or even vaguely seeming to care, so why should he?
And as he slowly disconnected from the screen, he actually began to feel a little better about it all, none of that stuff affected the reality he was living in, and he found a taste of freedom as he unchained himself from the weights of the world news.
But then as he looked around, he realized that no matter how far from the dominant culture he tried to position himself, he was still surrounded by prisoners desperately clinging onto some fading dream, and unwilling to even acknowledge that the alarms were about to start going off. So he did the only thing he knew how to, climbed back under the rock and braced for impact.
“And here I thought I lived outside of the loop. So anyway, Greta is this Swedish sixteen-year-old phenom who has taken the world by storm. She grew up in the unchanging climate of global warming denial, or even acceptance, and became fully enraged that none of the so-called adults were doing anything about it. She started at home by insisting her parents do their own research, which resulted in the life changes that seem obvious once you understand the gravity of the situation, but she didn’t stop there.
She was inspired by the student-led walkouts in Parkland concerning gun violence and school shootings, so she began her own school strike, where every single friday she ditched the classroom and posted up in front of her nation’s parliament building. By herself.
She held signs pleading that lawmakers do the right thing and properly address the crisis at hand. And to the critics who felt that a child’s place was locked in the halls of mandatory indoctrination, where she found that no one even mentioned what is certain to be the biggest challenge she will face in her lifetime, she simply responded that, “Since you grown-ups don’t care about my future, I won’t, either.”
Her political opponents insisted that if she wanted to bring change, then she should return to school and become a scientist, a laughable delay tactic as ninety-nine percent of the world’s scientific community is warning of imminent threat, yet the pocketed politicians claim they know better and keep rolling out the same garbage.
So anyway, here’s Greta, sitting by herself on the sidewalks of the Swedish parliament, rain or shine, every friday, and then something miraculous happens. Through one person’s passion for doing what is right, against all odds, for simply listening to the voice inside that spoke of personal privilege, responsibility, and power, she began to inspire more kids to play hooky and stand by her side. Her momentum kept growing, and her fanbase, and soon there was a global day of school strikes that spanned the continents with over a million premature voters demanding action now.”
“I’ve never even heard of this.”
“No, you wouldn’t have noticed it here, even if you were tapped into the kool-aid, our media ain’t got time for nothing that doesn’t perpetuate the narratives of stagnation. There were strikes here too, a lot smaller, because we encourage our youth to keep their activity on YouTube, away from the streets until they’re old enough to know better. But that’s where they found videos of the growing resistance that not only welcomed their underdeveloped acceptance of a broken world, they actually needed these troubled teens to stand up and fight alongside them.
YouTube remained the only source for footage of the Youth Climate Strike in America, but Greta began to see actual results, as politicians around the map saw no choice but to finally acknowledge the power of the people, especially those who would be of voting age by the next election. Greta has been nominated for a nobel prize, you can find her face immortalized in the street art of those spreading her inspiration, and all because she lived her truth, no matter what anyone else had to say about it.
She and her family stopped eating meat and dairy once they discovered that industrial meat, and meat by-products, are nearly as responsible for greenhouse emissions as the fossils that fuel our pizza delivery.
They stopped buying new clothes, because even a single petro-free cotton top consumes over two thousand gallons of water, that’s over a two year supply for some thirsty child laborer out there, plus the overstocked garment industry accounts for another ten percent of our carbon-based footprint.
They stopped flying in airplanes, which required a career shift for her mother, but it was unavoidable once they faced the facts that commercial air traffic is one of the most energy intensive elements of modern civilization, so much so, that a single cross-country flight has the negative impact equivalent of three lifetimes of not recycling. Of course, recycling’s just another strawman that excuses the gross consumption of beer cans, though that’s a loaded topic we’ll have to reclaim on a later flight.
But Greta wanted to come to America and see the mechanisms of mind control firsthand, because she knew that the grassroots of the playground were much more resilient than anyone gave them credit for. So how did she get here then? She took a sailboat. For three weeks on the high seas, maybe a little less convenient than the red eyes of jet lag, but I’ll bet it was quite an adventure.
And the adventure continues. She helped organizers with more schools strikes here and her campaign trail inspired millions to join in, plus she got to address world leaders at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, the one that our president only made a brief appearance at, since he had better things to do than to do anything about the fate of the entire world.
So you’re never gonna convince me that one person can’t make change, but it requires more than just tweeting the talking points of empty rhetoric, you have to go out there and do it. You have to be it. You have to live the change that you know in your heart is necessary for the good of all. You can’t sit around and wait for some sign that the time is nigh, because the time is now, and the scale of action that we need right now doesn’t happen all on its own, it happens on your own, so own it.”
She dropped the mic in his lap and waited on his next excuse. He was out of them. It was time to do something more than wishing he was doing something more. He didn’t know what yet, but he had this growing feeling that he didn’t have to, and that was filling him with the confidence to get out there and figure it out. Especially if she was gonna be there.
“I’m ready. If she can do it then so can I, but I dropped out of school a long time ago, so can’t really hop on board with her program, now can I?”
“Well, you could, her movement has expanded beyond juvenile delinquency and now there are strikers of all ages out there supporting the voices of the youth. Or, have you ever heard of XR? Extinction Rebellion?”
Again a no, so she faded into another montage to fill him in on the backstory.
“It started in London with some privileged white folk, they had genuine store bought educations and everything, so, like real people, scientists and shit, not just another campout full of Indians and hippies to write off as freeloaders standing in the way of progress.
They present some compelling facts about the status of our sixth great extinction event, the one we’re living through now, and their demands are simple. First and foremost, the world’s leaders must acknowledge that this is a crisis and declare a state of emergency, otherwise it seems unlikely to convince the government subsidized deniers that it’s anything but a hoax. Only then can we even begin to come up with a plan, which they want to see include a reduction to zero carbon emissions by 2025, twenty-five years earlier than the Paris Accord targets, but only five years before the IPCC’s deadline of irreversible feedback loops and runaway climate catastrophe.
They’re not just sitting by the phone though, they mean business, like, big business. They’ve been assembling at the banks that are funding the continued construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, because why are we building more conduits of devastation when we’re already burning alive, and there they’ve been supergluing themselves to the doors and windows into our financial futures. Another scene of child’s play perhaps, but their goal is to get arrested, because that’s how you sneak into the nightly news, and when it’s good old decent white people, people tune in.
They’re involved in tons of different actions really. They’ve gone global and each chapter plans its own autonomous version of resistance, with varying levels of danger and thrill, but my favorite was one of their originals.
They assembled six thousand protestors prepared to trade personal freedom for one united voice, and they occupied the five bridges that lead in and out of the city. They notified the authorities ahead of time and set it up so that emergency vehicles could still get through, but no one could commute, so they were forced to listen. They laid down in the street, or danced around, it was a scene of joyous merriment and song, and no motive to run and hide since their endgame was to get arrested, though it’s quite a point of privilege to anticipate incarceration without the accompanying gunshots and teargas that the rest of us get.
But it worked, the next week London had no choice but to become the biggest city in the world to declare an official state of climate emergency.”
“That’s so awesome. And you say they’re here too? I gotta find out more about them, but did you say, gunshots?”
“Yeah dude, activists aren’t people with rights, they’re even writing that into the state laws of the most controversial extraction points across the country. They can shoot us, spray us, legally run us over, they infiltrate our camps and hack into our Facebooks, well, not mine.
There is a real life convenience war going on out there, and the oppressors are the only ones with guns, and let me tell you that they are heavily armed and armored. And ruthless. But that’s just because they are so terrified that we will win, because as soon as the masses begin to grasp what’s really going on here, they’re going to be too outnumbered to teargas us all, and then we’re gonna see who’s left crying.”
“Holy shit just got real, unless you’re just messing with me again.”
“No sir, the frontlines of the pipeline fight are no joke, especially not when they spend twenty billion a year in private security contractors, and we’re not talking about your local mall cops here. Tell me you at least know about Standing Rock? I don’t think I have it in me to recap that whole thing.”
“Yeah, that one I’ve heard of, and read a fair bit about, but when you only keep updated through a screen, I guess it all starts to seem like a movie after a while. Were you there?”
“Yeah, but I can’t get into all that right now. Look, I gotta run, it’s been real nice hanging out and offloading some of my baggage onto someone who’s ready to listen, and you’re ready, trust me.
You may feel like some feeble little field mouse scared to venture outside the cage, but every step of your journey is there for a reason, and each one will make you stronger, in mind, body, and spirit. Treat each setback as a chance to evolve and every unknown as a new adventure, and by the time you reach that forest at the end of the road, you’ll look back and hardly recognize the version of yourself that set out to do something so long ago, and you’ll then be more than ready for whatever the hawks have to throw at you next. I promise.”
He couldn’t register that she was leaving. This was all ending as quickly as it had begun, or maybe it was all beginning as soon as it ended, either way, he was sad and happy and mad and inspired and depressed, all at once. She couldn’t leave him in this condition. She just couldn’t. Though he knew that she’d done more than her fair share of on-the-job training, so he sucked it up into his big boy pants and prepared for abandonment issues.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me where you’re going?”
“Well that’s good,” she cheerily replied. “But I can tell you that there’s an XR meeting here in town tomorrow night. You should check it out.”
“I’d love to. Will you be there?”
“Jeez dude, that’s like way too far in the future for me to even think about planning anything, I live most of my life on about a two hour notice.”
Right on cue, a red pickup pulled curbside with a cinematic halt, as if she’d been standing at the edge of a cliff and secretly observing her escape route, unbeknownst to the audience. She climbed into the back and turned to him with a smile, and then a wink that lit up with an arc of electricity as the seams of her eyelids made contact, and as his angel of anarchy rolled out of town, he heard her shout one last possible outcome of cosmic coincidence.
“But maybe!”
He was glowing and fluttering and all the things, at least until he realized his biggest misstep... He hadn’t even gotten her name.