Our Kids are Protesting: How Can We Help?

Vancouver Youth Climate Strike, March 15, 2019. Photo by Eva Uguen-Csenge/CBC reposted from CBC.
My kids are in the middle.

In the very small wake of Friday's global youth climate strike, I feel we adults need to remind ourselves what it's all about. At 1pm our time, 2000 people - mostly youth - gathered in Vancouver to beg the rest of us to see this climate crisis for what it is. Around the world, organizers estimate about 1 million children participated. Children spoke up about the desperate need to convert to a green economy immediately - to save their own lives. They call it "time to panic". An entire generation of humans sees no future unless we change our ways. Many parents joined to support their children, but in social media, countless members of older generations complained that their own protesting had failed; that government didn't listen; that it's a good thing the children are speaking up because it's their turn to act, now, and maybe people will listen to them.

No. It was never the government that might have listened. Protesting does little to change policy. Protesting is how we reach each other. Protesting is how we let our fellow citizens see that there is a very great injustice and how we demand change. But the change won't come unless we also make the change. Government isn't going to do it for us. Our children are talking to us.

This is the time to support our children's efforts by changing ourselves. We can stop using plastics. We can stop consuming electricity and processed food and oil and gas and clothing and paper and disposable goods of every sort like these things will keep on coming because they won't. They can't. We can't do this. Yes, our whole lives revolve around these - and we can't participate in contemporary societies without them. So we have to change our societies.

We have to give our kids enough time in their schedule to cook their own real food instead of buying them packaged processed foods. We have to set up their lives in such a way that they don't require being driven all over the place simply to participate in their communities. We have to find work that doesn't require us to drive all over the place, as well. We have to find local things to do with the people we love, instead of using school vacations to fly our kids off to exotic places. We have to create family engagement that doesn't rely on electricity or fuel, packaged plastic goods, shopping, and more consumption. We have to, also, stop having children. Not only because our growing population is compounding the problem of consumerism, but because we have condemned our children to a future of devastation instead of abundance.

Consumerism does not equal abundance. 

Abundance is still out there, but it doesn't come from stores and store-bought activities. It doesn't come from elsewhere. We can find it on the beaches in the summer with nothing but a bag of fruits and water jugs, a few swimsuits and towels. We can find it in the forests, where plants and animals live a life of abundance that is ours for sharing and for rejoicing in. We can find it in gatherings of friends and family, where love and laughter, dancing and singing and storytelling have kept us together for many thousands of years. We have to make these things happen. We have to show our children that there is a future in these things. In fact, the only future is in these things.

The government isn't listening to our kids, and they wouldn't make the necessary changes, even if they were. They are listening to the large corporations like Nestle and Chevron and Exxon/Mobil, and all the corporate lobbyists who change government policy to keep us spending money. We can't stop them. But we can stop buying into the lie of consumerism.

It's spring break. Cancel your vacation plans. Have a party. Respond to our children's desperate plea with real action and love. That is the only way all of us are going to survive the next few decades.