“If our small-minded politicians can’t empathize with the effects of climate change, then maybe they can empathize with being out of a job in 2020, and 2022, and 2024, and in 2026 when I will be able to vote.”
Those are the words of 12 year-old Taro, a speaker at the Youth Climate March in Seattle, but they do not sound like the words of a 6th grader – they sound like the words of a revolutionary, of a leader. Taro was only one among many youth who stepped beyond their years to speak, to make their voices heard, to let the generations above them know that they’re leaving a mess behind.
As inspiring and surprising as the ability and maturity of many of these youth were, they are exactly the people who should be outraged. Because it won’t be the generations that created this mess that have to face the worst effects of catastrophic climate change, it will be us, the youth, that are forced to live through it if we do nothing. We cannot vote for our future yet, so we did what we could — we spoke out. Despite the 1.4 million youth who took action across 100 countries, little has changed.
Sure, the media had their 24 hours of fun and some politicians made their speeches and their promises, but nothing even close to the drastic action scientists now say is imperative to halt climate change has happened.
Do I expect one protest to change everything? Of course not. However, I do find the extent to which we have forgotten and the extent to which nothing changed absolutely egregious. Even as the protests were occurring, U. S. diplomats were weakening ecological agreements with the United Nations.
The truth is, we have reached the point now where the battle against climate change has become an all-out war — the World Health Organization estimates that climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year, more deaths per year than the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history. Given the incredible danger posed by such a prospect, one would expect the media to be covering the latest victories and defeats constantly, just as they would a deadly war, but that is not what is happening.
Nevertheless, we shouldn’t blame the media for their lack of coverage, because it is us they are pandering to. We, the citizens of the world, are the ones who aren’t viewing climate change like a deadly war for our future, and we need to. It is a war, and it is one we are not fighting.
In this war for our future, our voices are our weapons and silence is violence, because the greatest blow we can deal ourselves is to stand idly by as humanity loses a war with its own hubris, unable to even agree that the war exists.