As someone who fancies themselves an “adult,” it’s hard not to take exception with Great Thorn,i the precocious and wildly unhinged teenager raised by a renegade band of political extremists in the small banana republic known as “Sweden.”ii
Thornzilla, for the blissfully unaware, is the de facto leader of the populist-activist renaissance currently taking place in public squares the world over, and she’s therefore the current media darling in charge of lecturing birds how to fly, as it were.iii In an effort to pressure elected iv political officials to “act” on “climate schmange,” the Thornster herself spoke at the UN Climate Summit this week in a widely publicised and fairly cringe-worthy speech. Displaying all the ocular twitchiness of a Red Bull-addled CoD champion, Thornsicles started her lecture with an intentionally ominous “We will be watching you.” She said this with all the arrogance and pride of someone who clearly didn’t know that Santa Claus and Hashem already had those bases covered. But she’s young, and maybe she hadn’t heard SC+H yet, so let’s not be too hard on her. She continued with such stinging quips as “We will never forgive you,” also demonstrating her ignorance of Jesus, who already died for our sins, like 2000 years ago dude, and then she was all “Right here, right now, is where we draw the line,” but that just reminds me of Bahamas’ “red line” in Syria, and he had the US Military behind his word. What does Thornanny have ? The legacy of the dearly departed Occupy movement and the wind in her sails.v “How dare you?” was Thornybaba’s most common rejoinder, but how dare SHE let herself be used as a mouthpiece for dystopian alarmists. Obviously, some of us are just more drawn to darkness rather than light, but it’s a shame that darkness is so en vogue with kids these. A sign of the changing times! Just not one “changing” how she thinks.
Thornadongadingdong, if she doesn’t drink too many more energy drinks between now and then, could very well be Swedish Prime Minister in twenty years. She’s certainly interviewing for it well. Some kids say the darnedest things just for fun, but we’d be remiss in dismissing them entirely. They do know how to get our attention.
And that’s ultimately Thornasaurus’ mission, for us to pay attention to her. Because without fossil fuels to keep the lights on and build also those wonderful carbon fibre-hulled racing yachts, don’t you think it’s going to be even more of an attention economy out there ? If there’s anything us “adults” can learn from the next generation, it’s not that we should drive more Teslas and fly 787s less, it’s that no one cares about ourselves as much as we do, so if we aren’t going to be our own best publicists, who will be ?
In the race to shine the spotlight on ourselves, the kids really have us old folks licked. It’s just too bad they don’t know how to dance, sing, or act yet. Ok, maybe they can act a little…
___ ___ ___
- aka “Greta Thunberg”↩
- aka “The Land of IKEA and VOLVO.” ↩
- “Lecturing birds how to fly” is typical of first-order thinkers, whether teenagers or otherwise, particularly those so obsessed with “carbon” that they lose their cool at the merest suggestion of “fossil fuels” (on which economic, technological, and whatever pretences to social progress undeniably depend), thereby inadvertently heating the planet with the steam whistling out of their ears. Go figure! ↩
- Isn’t it funny how these “democratic” “people’s” movements waste their time pleading with the UN and the EU, two entirely unelected but still supposedly “powerful” institutions ? ↩
- Apparently the girl does actually sail around the globe in an effort to “live” “carbon neutral,” but apparently the embodied carbon in her FUCKING £4m RACING YACHT is ok. Nothing to see here. Move it along. The two people then required to fly from Europe to New York to sail the boat back to Europe are apparently “better than doing nothing” despite being at least twice as terrible as the alternative of just flying economy class in the first place. Mkay. ↩