When keen to persuade others of your moral sanctity, gluing oneself to a train possesses a deeper gravitas than signing a petition. And telling people you’ve signed that petition.
Climate-change protesters (or cloud-yellers) have this week collapsed London, folding the capital into a grand theater of their own self-adulation. The audience is captive, quite literally.
Fear not, dear pleb, they’re doing this for you. Jostling for the camera lens, pithy placards daubed with twee proclamations loft high above the man-bunned heads of those with time to spend their weekdays clogging London’s roads. And not at work.
One read: “Sorry. We are only trying to save the planet.” Such sacrifice! The protesters, humbly calling themselves the Extinction Rebellion, are taking a few hours from their days to do the mere work of saving humanity. They’ll achieve this small feat by clogging London traffic. By gluing themselves to trains. And by bobbing placards.
Police have arrested more than 1,000 people since April 15, while more than 10,000 police officers have been deployed.
As I write, a platoon of pea-powered paladins is gluing itself to the London Stock Exchange. Their reasoning? Finance fuels climate change. Or something.
Like the Tragedy Hipster, these folks aren’t too sure about what they actually want. Only the return of their youthful flush.
What they amount to in reality is a jamboree of narcissistic white liberals pretending to be a procession of piety and sacrifice. They are doing this for you. And please, they don’t like to talk about it.
One radiant example is Dame Emma Thompson, the actress.
Keen to save the planet, Emma shoveled a mere 4.14 tons of earth-ravaging carbon into the atmosphere during her 5,400-mile flight from L.A. to London. That figure is one-way.
But don’t worry. She plants trees. Apologetically, she added in an interview for BBC Radio 4, “We are all going to have to fly a lot less.”
By “we,” she means those who make society hum, so not really her. The garbage men, the cleaners, the daily-breaders. Those now afforded cheap air travel and the enrichment such entails, thanks to the capitalism against which the Dame and her bobo brethren rage.
Yet, boiling below that gauzy sheen of progressive compassion lies an unfiltered and occasionally unmasked contempt for the ordinary citizen. Those whose days are usually concerned with getting to work and perhaps afterward enjoying a beer, a cigarette, or slab of red meat. Sensual pursuits which, sooner or later, progressives will unstitch for your own good.
Among the throng, hypocrisy is the reserve currency.
Another compassionista, Robin Boardman-Pattison, sulked and swaggered off Sky News after the presenter had the temerity to suggest the double-barreled toff was slightly hypocritical.
Privileged Boardman-Pattison, product of a $22,500-a-year school, demanded that planes be grounded, awaiting only an emergency. Such emergencies presumably include his countless selfie-collecting trots abroad.
Of course. This isn’t about the climate. It is about force-feeding progressive uniformity down the gullets of those who refuse to vote for it.
One demand of the Extinction Rebellion is a Citizen’s Assembly. It might present as news to them that we already have one: it is called Parliament. Comprised of 650 lawmakers, this citizen’s assembly harbors one lawmaker of the desired Extinction Rebellion mold.
And for good reason. Caroline Lucas is our sole Green Party MP. Perhaps because her constituency of Brighton Pavillion seemingly is run by laudanum-infused baboons. Brighton council sits at 317 on the recycling league table. Just 28 places from the very bottom. Do as we say, dear pleb, not as we do.
Stranger still is the climate protesters’ fawning of their de facto spiritual guide. She is 16 years old. Too young to smoke. Too young to be taken seriously.
Yes. Our great civilization, the elite skim of it, marrows its faith within the still-growing bones of teenagers like Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.
Greta travels across Europe lecturing adults.
She even addressed our lawmakers this week. They “haven’t listened” to the whims of children, she charged. Remarkably, the circle of simper agreed.
To be sure: nobody actually listened. If they did, they’d have debunked every word that slithered between Greta’s barely-adult teeth.
Her demand (that is what she called it) that we end fossil fuels by 2025 is almost laughable. Our zero-emissions target is set for 2050.
Yet, she fails to mention that a great deal indeed has been done. We have listened.
The UK has cut carbon emissions by 42 percent since 1990. Since 2010, emissions have fallen by a quarter. That is without crumpling the economy, and the livelihoods of millions, into pre-industrial brutality.
If anything is going to arrest such a “crisis,” the solution will come from those pesky capitalists. Not middle-aged Trustafarians gluing themselves to trains.
But they say next to nothing on the real issue. China, as Boris Johnson pointed out, blasts more carbon into the atmosphere than the European Union and the United States combined. That matters little.
We now live in an age where there are no right answers and all opinions are equally valid. Remarkably, the Boomers want another crack at depraving the future—living vicariously through the identikit youth.
Yes. After tripping and riffing their way through the 1960s, after pretending that Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is more than semi-literate waffling, the Boomers refuse to settle into the still Sunday of their lives.
Hence why the cult of youth resounds. Of course, all have the right to protest. But that doesn’t mean they have even the faintest grasp of the vapors which so readily stream from their nostrils.
David Hogg and the Parkland kids are a case in point. Doubtless, these students endured the gravest of traumas. But such trauma shouldn’t shield one from the corrective beauty of reason or fact.
Like Greta, what the Parkland kids spout on social media is taken as infallible. They, like her, say little of substance. When confronted with logic, evidence—those relics of civilization—they storm off set, fingers in ears.
Their Boomer handlers luxuriate in such spectacle. As if transfusing their youthful blood.
But the youngsters and oldsters can have their fun. They can glue themselves to trains. Wail at their mess. And we will clean it up. If they let us.