We Are Greta
There once was a young girl superhero named Greta. …….She overcame Aspergers and conquered an ocean to speak for those who like clean air to breathe and fresh clean water to drink. She had seen the research done by 11,000 scientists that said that we Earthlings have 12 years to turn climate change around, before the damage becomes irreparable. She knew what that meant.
Greta saw that law and policy makers were ignoring the data handed over to them by their researchers. She saw that their power had made them greedy. She saw that it had made them forgetful of the planet to which we are all beholden for our lives. Her care for her fellow Man compelled her to travel hundreds of miles to remind them that their lives, and ALL OUR LIVES, depend on the Earth that we are defiling.
Her heroic attempt at this intervention was met with jeers and insults
The “grown-up” policy makers who are paid to protect the interests and welfare of our country ignored the content of her impassioned statement, and instead made much of the scolding manner in which the wise woman-child had spoken it. She had committed the unpardonable sin of being too wise for her age, and they couldn’t stand that they’d been rightfully shamed by one so young.
She was a drama queen, they said.
She should go back to school, they said.
She was impertinent with a face that contorted in an ugly manner to show her passion, they said.
They said all these things, and nothing about her bravery in speaking to them, when she had to know full well the futility of speaking truth to power. They said nothing about her having risked falling behind in school to cross an ocean to speak that truth when it had already fallen on deaf ears.
Maybe our scientists are Greta too.
They were equally as ignored as Greta when they presented the facts to our legislators.
They were equally as ignored as women were, before (and after) the suffragette movement. They were equally as ignored as asylum seekers in US cages are, today. They were equally as ignored as Black slaves, in America, before Emancipation. They are equally as ignored as Hispanic and LGBTQAI Americans seeking only equality here in the US ……..
The White House has been allowed to continue to ignore its constituents with its roll-backs of EPA protections that were keeping our air and water clean. It has proved its lack of care for our interests and welfare since 2016.
https://medium.com/@suehirsch/the-cost-of-trump-ii-a12b4a7d3cc4
https://medium.com/@suehirsch/no-friend-to-humanity-83786909985
https://medium.com/@suehirsch/dear-trump-supporters-youve-won-987b26bc4fef
Congress is now lead by a minority that must busy itself putting a stopper on the corruption that enables this embodiment of greed and senility that presides in the Oval Office. They will have no time to deal with the needs of the planet on which we live, for several years.
Those of us who see this clearly, know that the only solution is to look elsewhere for the kind of strength and vision that will lead us forward to a sustainable and SURVIVABLE life-style.
Eyes are turning to California………..
The world sees our recent fires, and they doubt. They look at us and misinterpret homeless statistics. They hate that we would rock their conservative boat by attempting to redress the atrocities committed against minorities like the Indigenous Nations within our own state.
They prefer to believe that we can’t possibly be expected to take care of our own.
We do take care of our own. It may take more than an hour or a day, considering that Californians pay more taxes per capita than just about ALL the rest of the states, but we take care of our own people. We also take care of our own forests. We don’t care for our forests with rakes, as your US “president” suggests, because it’s not how nature intended. The leaves that fall to the ground become mulch, which feeds the forest floor, so that it feeds the roots of plants and trees which holds the ground fast against erosion.
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/ways-prevent-erosion-covering-bare-soil-mulch-straw-45068.html
https://www.highdesertmulching.com/benefits-of-mulch
And more of our people are doing the math and learning that keeping our tax dollars in California would mean being able to house ALL our homeless, indefinitely.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2332401010377041&substory_index=0&id=1388579781425840
But maybe our homeless are Greta, too. Their needs are equally as ignored by their “Federal Government”, and it falls on city and state governments to deal with them. It falls on city and state governments to decide what issues will get attention and funding and which ones will be ignored for another year……
More Californians are realizing that it is WE who provide most of the funding for the US war machine, when that funding could be feeding and housing California citizens.
Take the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, for instance, which, as NBC has reported, originated with “Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank for the Africa region and a senior advisor on Africa Economic Development Policy for the Open Society Foundations” — a George Soros-backed foundation. In no time, the social media “effort” had become the most effective lobbying force behind the expansion of the never-ending war on terror. And whether it was meant to promote this outcome or not, it helped the United States easily invest more tax dollars into an unwinnable war.
More Californians are learning that we could not only SURVIVE secession, but THRIVE as a sovereign nation and be better off than we are now.
We are noting a particular statistic that says that California is the FIFTH LARGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD. We are remembering that it is California that FEEDS most of the world on beef, dairy, and produce. We are remembering that we have TWO ocean ports, and could easily make NGO agreements to trade with other countries, without being stymied by tRump’s tariffs, and that we’ve already done so, when we DIDN’T pull out of the Paris Accords, with the rest of the US, because tRump said it was a bad deal for you.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-paris-states-20170602-story.html
How bad a deal can it be to simply agree to uphold a few air quality standards that we had all been upholding FOR DECADES, SO THAT YOU CAN CONTINUE TO BREATHE?!
Californians have decided that we like breathing.
That’s why our Governor Newsom is leading us in sticking to our car emissions standards. Oddly, tRump thinks that he has a right to tell car makers how to do their jobs, when he doesn’t employ the company CEOs. He thinks that just because he is the “president” he gets to say “Jump” and we all have to ask “How high”?
That is not the purview of a president.
IT’S THE PURVIEW OF A DICTATOR.
Californians are beginning to remember that we have some jurisdiction within our own borders.
We have outlawed private (for profit) prisons, and soon we will outlaw detention centers (read: concentration camps) for asylum seekers, here too, and eventually, we will dismantle the border crossing and make policy that makes it easier to assimilate immigrants who are happy to boost our economy by working for a living, picking our crops, caring for our children and elders, cleaning our homes, starting up restaurants and dry cleaning services, and even Fortune 500 companies……..because they have:
Their Fortune 500 companies have employed many, as have their restaurant chains and dry cleaning chains, and that has long boosted our economy……..although the US will never admit it, or that California has gained the most by it.
https://calmatters.org/immigration/2019/06/immigrant-entrepreneurs-california-economy/
But what does the rest of the US have to gain by telling us that we DON’T have the 5th largest economy in the world, and that we COULDN’T take care of our own, if we were an independent and sovereign nation? What did they gain by their lies that our Indigenous Brothers and Sisters DIDN’T want their land back, and that Kanyon (Coyote Woman) Sayer-Roods WASN’T A REAL PERSON?
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-calexit-ballot-measure-20180807-story.html
https://medium.com/@marcus.ruiz.evans/hating-on-california-goes-mainstream-oct-2019-80c0398f2eea
Maybe they’re worried that California will set the bar, in terms of good manners, by beginning on a path of making reparations and keeping treaties that the US has broken, then ALL Native American Tribes will expect the US to act with similar honor and common decency.
Maybe if more Californians knew and believed the fact that we could get on just fine as a sovereign nation, and begin trade negotiations with the rest of the world, (INCLUDING THE US) then we’d all start signing the petition to get secession on the ballot, and the US would have to start being just a little bit nicer to us.
Not only that, but the US would have to STOP making war in other countries, because they wouldn’t be able to support their war machine, without our tax dollars added to their own. That might mean that they’d have to start relying more on clean energy and less on oil from tRump’s beloved Saudi Arabian friends, and from his pipeline that leaked oil into land and water that belonged by treaty to the Dakotas. (DAPL).
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dakota-access-pipeline-leak-energy-transfer-partners/
Eventually, every oil pipeline seems to leak into our oceans, and water tables. We’re killing ourselves, and Greta came to tell us what our scientists had already told us: That we have 12 years to clean up our act……or less.
Some of our legislators pretended to listen politely, and then sniggered behind their hands at the girl with the passion contorted face, who had come across an ocean to scold them, and remind them that they don’t own this planet. They just live on it with us, and they have to breathe the same air we do, and drink the same water we do. But she, and I and my 16 year old son will have to suffer the results of their handiwork a lot longer than they will.
Many of them will be dead, retiring or retired into old age homes, when my son will be graduating from college, and I wonder if he and I will have to wear gas masks to his graduation. I am sure that my parents won’t want to come out to see him graduate on his school football field, if they have to wear gas masks.
So maybe my own family is also Greta, because their need for clean air is not being heard.
Maybe Flint Michigan parents are Greta, because they’re collective grief is not being heard. Many of them lost babies and children, because their water was fouled by sloppy handling at their treatment plants. That got swept under the rug pretty quickly by the same legislators that ignored Greta.
They pretended to listen politely for a few minutes, and when she left the room, they called her “drama queen” and went on a bit in the same dismissive attitude with which they’ve treated ALL our environmental concerns, along with our socio-economic ones, because…….
THEY SIMPLY DON’T CARE ABOUT US.
WE ALL deserve better.
More than any other state in the Union, California is in a position to do better, and since she CAN, ……….
SHE MUST.