Greta: You failed, but you could learn from Hong Kong.
After a year spent mobilising the middle-class masses, calling out UN bureaucrats and trolling Trump, Greta’s battlecry marching into 2020 is: “We have achieved nothing.”
Greta Thunberg and her pigtails took the world by storm last year, bringing entire cities to their knees and forcing world leaders to shut up and listen. She didn’t make life easy for herself, our Greta. Going against every self-help book ever written, she set herself the gargantuan task of single-handedly saving the world and all its people from the consequences of our own actions.
One does not simply walk into Mordor, after all.
In his edited collection charting the course of British protest from the peasant revolts of 1381 to the anti-Iraq War protests of 2003, Ra Page argues that the instance of popular rebellion itself often leads to incremental changes in government policy which favour the demands made by the rebels and protesters, irrespective of whether the movement ended with their leaders in gallows or government.
But where incremental changes might work for the gradual emancipation of the working classes, the climate crisis is a little too urgent to be addressed over the course of centuries.
Enter Hong Kong, and the astonishing success of a a few hundred thousand voices against the world’s richest and most resilient authoritarian regime.
Read the full article here on Medium.