• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
  • WORLD DEMOCRACY
  • POLITICAL ART
  • more
    • election technology
    • money politics
    • political dissidents
    • THIRD PARTY
      • third party central
      • green party
      • justice party
      • libertarian party
    • voting methods
  • DC INFO
    • author central
    • about
    • advertise with DC
    • contact
    • privacy policy

Democracy Chronicles

Innocent Children Won’t Save Our Planet: London 2019.

by David Anderson, J.D. - April 27, 2019

Facebook87TweetLinkedInPin2Shares89
Innocent Children Won’t Save Our Planet
“No Pollution Please” from Christos Lamprianidis – Image source

To coincide with Earth Day last week the extremist group Extinction Rebellion staged a flashy 10 days of protests in downtown London.

One way to look at this is as a necessary “wake up call” – to coin a tired cliché – about a pressing global problem. Another view is that it was an ineffective, narcissistic and counterproductive waste of time.

The protests were headlined by Greta Thunberg, 16, a charismatic Swedish school girl activist. If you have to examine exactly why having “an innocent child” as any standard bearer is inherently cretinous you probably should be reading the crayon edition of Democracy Chronicles. Further, given the poor girl’s delicate mental setup as reported by Quilette lately, her mother-fueled celebrity status could even be called grotesquely exploitative.

This is not to disparage environmental activism in general, just some of its wild and useless tactics: street clogging sit-and-sulk-ins went out half a century ago.

So what to do?

Like all meta-problems climate change requires data analysis as well as micro and macro strategies: not just pissing off Londoners trying to get to work.

Innocent Children Won’t Save Our Planet
Greta Thunberg – Image source

On the individual level, there’s a lot one can do. While extreme, not breeding is probably the best idea: you can give all your money to Greenpeace, you can recycle, down cycle and bicycle everything you do or consume for the rest of your life and still not touch equalizing the resources gobbled down by that little bundle of joy and its descendants. Its drastic I’ll grant you and there are more immediate actions available.

Journalist Kate Harveston penned an excellent article a few months ago in The Moderate Voice with a line by line checklist of exactly how, at a personal level, one can reduce one’s impact on the planet. The problem is a collective action one, but so is democracy and we handle that. Make no mistake, small individual efforts like those summarized by Ms. Harveston help and none on her list are a major chore.

On the macro level there’s more one can do to save the planet such as give Money to the right causes. If you’re not very wealthy though, the best thing you can do for the environment is to vote Democrat and help others to.

We are spoiled for choice in America. Few countries offer such a dichotomy between good and bad voting as the USA. Our two party system is a binary of environmental destruction verses sane management. In fact, currently there are no political parties in any democracy which deny climate change apart from our Republicans.

Environmental destruction is part of their tribal garb, a dynamic which fits into their authoritarian “I’m tough and strong and brutal and armed” macho posturing image. Flower stomping is their brand, pollution their product and Republicans flaunt this beyond the point of parody. Which would be hilarious if it weren’t so damn damaging and also evidence of their trembling cowardice and transparently selfish world-view.

Being the political wing of the fossil fuel cartel the Republicans’ tribal war paint also includes guns, loosening pollution standards (including for mercury as endorsed by both presidents Bush and Trump), deforestation, the battering, defunding and shrinking of National Parks and public transport, and in keeping with their religiosity forcing women to have as many babies as they don’t want: here and abroad. That last one is their worst environmental atrocity and, of course, is in lockstep with their allies the “faith community” and its holy war to regress civilization.

Another part of that Republican worldview is a dangerous rejection of science and an enthusiastic embrace of willful ignorance. The ever diminishing intellectual quality of their standard bearers attest to this: from Reagan to Bush to Palin to Trump in a downward spiral of stupidity over the decades.

Sure the Democrats might not go as far as we’d like environmentally, but their policies are on the right path, sane and scientifically informed. This is in total opposition to other side’s esteem of “faith” (the purposeful suspension of reason), what feels “tough”, pleases the owners/donors or whatever idiocy our narcissist president tweets out in his early stage Alzheimer’s rage.

The Democrats not being Republicans isn’t their only saving grace, remember: they can win given the constraints of our system. Their main problem is too few supporters of their policies actually vote. Forget “convincing” anybody, concentrate on the physics of getting the humans you know to the polls, or better, postal voting.

Imagine you’re saving a small part of the biosphere with every person you help vote, with every millennial friend you convince that an Instagram “like” is not actually a legal vote, with every donation of money, time, and volunteering.

While doing so be sure to not let anybody believe voting for the “Green Party” is anything except counterproductive. Their notorious anti-vaxer nominee Jill Stein is berserk, her policies are unworkable, mainly insane, and in our system she’s effectively a vote for Trump. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, a vote for the Greens is a vote against the environment.

The type of brouhaha staged in London and associated civic hooliganism can occasionally be useful to draw attention to an unknown or unacknowledged injustice: think Ferguson, the Muslim Ban or BLM. However for a widely understood problem such as climate change, a hippy-esque orgy of virtue signaling might get you a date in London but won’t help the planet. And it makes concerned adults look like fools for following the idiotic nonsense of the “innocence of a child.”

Facebook87TweetLinkedInPin2Shares89

Filed Under: DC Authors Tagged With: Democracy Protests, Democrats, Green Party News, Third Party

About David Anderson, J.D.

David Anderson is an Australian-American lawyer in NYC with an education in (Middle East) politics and psychology and a career background in finance and law.

Some highlighted Democracy Chronicles topics

Africa American Corruption American Local Elections American State Elections Asia Capitalism and Big Business Celebrity Politics China Democracy Charity Democracy Protests Democrats Dictatorships Education Election History Election Methods Election Security Election Transparency Europe Internet and Democracy Journalism and Free Speech Middle East Minority Voting Rights Money Politics New York City and State Elections Political Artwork Political Dissidents Political Lobbying Redistricting Republicans Russia Socialism and Labor Social Media and Democracy South America Spying and Privacy Supreme Court Third Party Voter Access Voter ID Voter Registration Voter Suppression Voter Turnout Voting Technology Women Voting Rights Worldwide Worldwide Corruption

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jack Jones says

    May 2, 2019 at 11:59 am

    Thank you, for another well thought and executed article . I agree I like what the Dems are doing for the environment. We should encourage and help them any way we can!

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Home | DC AUTHORS | Innocent Children Won’t Save Our Planet: London 2019.

Primary Sidebar

Advertise button

Harnessing The Power Of “We The People” On Independence Day

By Jenna Spinelle July 3, 2022

Democracy does not have a singular definition, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting to me — and undoubtedly to many of you.

Florida Doesn’t Need a Speech Czar

By Steve Schneider June 28, 2022

Full disclosure: I’m a liberal Democrat. So, I won’t be sending in my vote-by-mail ballot for Ron DeSantis in November. Nor will I vote for him in 2024.

democracy chronicles newsletter

DC AUTHORS

Introducing: When The People Decide

By Jenna Spinelle June 25, 2022

Several activists and average citizens have changed their communities and the country by taking important issues directly to votes.

Democracy’s Summer Blockbusters

By Jenna Spinelle June 8, 2022

The summer will be legally and politically charged particularly with the January 6 committee hearings scheduled to begin June 9.

Can American Democracy Have Nice Things?

By Jenna Spinelle June 7, 2022

Universal voting would be the surest way to protect against voter suppression and the active disenfranchisement of a large share of our citizens.

PODCAST: Baby Boomers And American Gerontocracy

By Jenna Spinelle May 23, 2022

Older and younger voters are increasingly at odds: Republicans as a whole skew gray-haired, and within the Democratis, the left-leaning youth vote.

A Dangerous Reprise Of American Exceptionalism In Ukraine

By Jamie Lampidis May 15, 2022

The stakes are too high to cave into Putin’s phantasmatic imperial play, and too high to believe that this war can be won by arming Ukrainians.

On The Coming End Of Roe v. Wade

By Peter J. Dellolio May 11, 2022

Anyone who says that the evolution of law has nothing to do with politics is either very corrupt or very stupid. Laws evolved through the centuries.

Goodbye Roe v. Wade, Goodbye Rule Of Law

By Andrew Straw May 5, 2022

Congress should impeach judges who act like that because it is not good behavior, and they were asked not to act that way when they were confirmed.

MORE FROM OUR AUTHORS

VISIT OUR POLITICAL ART SECTION:

dc political art

DEMOCRACY CULTURE

India: Why Are Punjab Political Singers Under Attack?

India: Why Are Punjab Political Singers Under Attack?

June 8, 2022

The murder of Sidhu Moose Wala has brought attention to the link between Punjabi music and India’s cross-border criminal networks.

University Educated Less Likely To Endorse Authoritarianism

University Educated Less Likely To Endorse Authoritarianism

June 4, 2022

Higher education is now seen as a new political cleavage, with level of education increasingly important in describing political attitudes.

From Cake To Volunteers, Welcome To Australia’s Democracy Day

From Cake To Volunteers, Welcome To Australia’s Democracy Day

May 25, 2022

The atmosphere in the interstate polling booth in Sydney’s inner east resembled that of an emergency room waiting for a donor organ.

Kenyan 'Cartooning For Peace' To Draw Africa Towards Democracy

Kenyan ‘Cartooning For Peace’ To Draw Africa Towards Democracy

May 17, 2022

Cartooning is an art that has been playing a major role in illustrating stories in different ways, from health to politics, and even sports.

Anxious Leaders Influence Their Followers' Anxiety, Even Online

Anxious Leaders Influence Their Followers’ Anxiety, Even Online

May 17, 2022

Organizational leader’s tweets can influence employee anxieties and this effect is more prominent since the rise of COVID-19, study.

MORE CULTURE

VISIT OUR US DEMOCRACY SECTION:

American Democracy