Trust me, MoonNukers, I am giving you only the funniest bits from this twelve-billion-word article on someone who humbly doesn’t want to be talked about anymore.
Greta Thunberg Doesn’t Want You to Talk About Her Anymore
Politico | April 28, 2022 | Karl Mathiesen
The pandemic wasn’t just a body blow for an organization completely reliant on momentum from the streets. For many of the activists involved, it also deprived them of a place to give voice to a shared dread: what kids in these times call “climate anxiety.”
Oddly, for a bunch of kids considering the apocalypse, the vibe was all about having fun.
“. . . we would just play music and hang out with each other,” said Mitzi Jonelle Tan, the convener of Youth Advocates for Climate Action Philippines and a Fridays For Future organizer. In contrast to Thunberg’s popular public image, which is largely based on the angriest segments of her speeches, those who know her describe her as warm, caring, funny, extremely blunt and, at times, silly.
Struggling against a whole different set of challenges in places like Uganda, the Philippines or India, they had different ideas about what it meant to fight climate change; and they were ready to call out the ignorance of their rich, white friends.
When back-to-back typhoons threatened Tan’s hometown in the Philippines in late-2020, Western members sent through a list of emergency measures she could take. Fill the bathtub with water, they said, in case she was trapped in her home without drinking water. “And I’m like, I don’t have a tub.”
Even the name Fridays For Future — which Thunberg had started as a hashtag when her school strikes were still minor gatherings outside the Swedish parliament — was a crock. For much of the world’s population, climate change isn’t a future concern, said Tan. “We’re not just fighting for our future, we’re fighting for our present.”
On separate calls, activists from the global south and indigenous communities formed a group called MAPA — Most Affected People and Areas — and decided Fridays For Future needed to be reshaped if they were to be part of it. They organized “decolonization trainings” for their fellow activists, which Thunberg joined. “We were holding each other accountable because we cared about each other as a movement,” said Tan.
Thunberg was a sponge.
The planet might have been closing down, but Thunberg’s world was opening up.
According to interviews with 10 of her closest collaborators and fellow activists, what she heard during those quiet, introspective months changed her — and accelerated an evolution in the focus of her efforts.
In her early teens, Thunberg became sick. She ceased eating and talking.
Activism, both Thunberg and her parents have said, was her salvation. It was also a process of finding and banding together people who shared her anxiety and her view that, ultimately, climate change is a moral question: right and wrong — or as she has said, black and white.
At a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the Congress, Thunberg found herself sitting next to Tokata Iron Eyes, a Sioux youth leader whose Standing Rock tribe were fighting against the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. When Iron Eyes stood to speak, she pointed at a painting of Abraham Lincoln — a white man who had been responsible for the oppression of her ancestors. Why, she asked, should she trust Pelosi to deliver justice for her people? Iron Eyes sat down crying.
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“Greta put her arm around her and sat with her,” said Henn, who was at the meeting. Then when it came time for the group to take a picture with Pelosi — “which is clearly what [Pelosi] was looking for” — Thunberg refused, preferring to stay and comfort Iron Eyes.
She “wasn’t really interested in being in this photo with the Speaker of the House, which made, of course, her staff incredibly angry at me,” Henn said. Pelosi’s Deputy Chief-of-Staff Drew Hammill said the intention had been to hear from the activists: “The focus was never a photo op and press was not invited.”
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In the following weeks, Thunberg road-tripped across the U.S. in an electric car loaned to her by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
She and her father went to a cemetery in Lindstrom, Minnesota, a leafy, lakeside town that calls itself “America’s Little Sweden” — founded in 1894 and named after a Swedish settler called Daniel Lindström. There the neat, well-kept graves marked the prosperous lives of people who could have been the Thunbergs’ ancestors.
The pair then drove to South Dakota and joined Iron Eyes at the Pine Ridge Reservation
Get ready . . .
Thunberg was struck by the contrast — by the disparity between two communities living at exactly the same time that was still playing out more than a century later. In a book coming out in the fall, according to someone familiar with the text, Thunberg says this 24-hour period gave her a new perspective on the world; one that she struggled to accept.
To be sure, things have shifted in the era of Greta.
Truer words have never been printed.
Many young people who had responded to Thunberg’s childlike demand for a fair future, drifted away when the movement started examining what fairness would really require. “We are fully aware that we’re not millions on the streets” anymore, said Lasota, the Polish activist.
Solutions include a demand for “climate reparations.” That involves handing back land to indigenous communities and transferring wealth and political power from the richest countries that caused climate change to those that will bear the brunt.
Thunberg did not want to be interviewed for this article — which is really the point, as POLITICO was reminded bluntly . . .
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