From Parkland to Stockholm

It’s odd that conservative parties the world over, favoring wealth and power over financial and environmental protections for the vast majority of their citizens, seem to be ignoring a building tsunami rising behind them, one that will permanently sweep them away. Their arguments are always the same: protect wealth at the top, remove restrictions and responsibility, and jobs and money will flow down to the masses. We have called it “supply-side economics,” “Reaganomics” and “trickle down economics.” 

And those three descriptive epithets have three unifying features: they have never worked, they do not work now and they will never work. Wealthy people with newfound cash do not take that spare money and instantly begin creating jobs. They didn’t get rich being that stupid.

If the economy sinks, they use spare cash to buy distressed assets. That’s the story of the recent Great Recession. If the economy is good, they use that extra money to buy-back their own shares. That’s legacy of the recent massive tax cuts accorded the richest in the land. Underemployment is now epidemic. When they do choose to invest, even when they are willing to take risks inside the trade-war-driven United States, their money goes into worker-displacing automation. If there are new jobs, those that remain after automation is the rule tend to pay the remaining workers less, even as they require them to work harder. They push labor off their payrolls into off-balance-sheet short-term contracting or rely on a locally outsourced gig economy.

In the United States, the radical right has managed to embrace those it has harmed the most: working class Americans displaced from once well-paying jobs. “Protect our Second Amendment Rights.” “Ban abortion.” “End Socialized Medicine.” “Stop job-killing environmental regulations.” And as such incomes fall, as the opioid epidemic has targeted that demographic, as local water supplies witness rising toxicity, floods join fires and virulent mega-storms that destroy homes, workplaces and farms and summers smolder in unprecedented heat, and as gut-tearing military bullets from civilian-owned assault rifles involved in mass shootings have killed about 300 Americans in 2019 alone, Donald Trump and the redefined Republican Party scoff at the tree-huggers and “radical socialist left.”

There’s one catch: that tsunami is not coming from the outside. It’s a rising tide of their own children, watching the documentary and news footage showing the ravages and the expected destruction from man-induced climate change. It is their “active shooter drills,” knowing other children who have been murdered by the spray of AR-15 bullets. It the news coverage of the white supremacists, xenophobics and displaced unskilled workers vetting their anger as dark “angels of vengeance.” It’s the world that we have asked them to spend the rest of their lives coping with, knowing that they will experience the brunt of the “worst is yet to come.”

Whether Democrats have grappled sufficiently with these life-threats, knowing that the GOP is absolutely going in the wrong direction, and facing a new form of job obsolescence from artificial intelligence just as the cost of a meaningful education has exploded into absurdly expensive, these youngsters are both sophisticated, linked by social media, and angry.

In response to the active shooter execution of 17 students and faculty, “On Saturday, March 24, [2018] people across the US and worldwide — from London to Paris to Mauritius to Mumbai — took to the streets to protest for stricter gun laws. The mass demonstrations, which took place under the banner ‘March For Our Lives,’ were instigated by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students to ensure no more innocent lives would be lost to gun violence, like the shooting experienced at the school on February 14.

“One of the biggest rallies was in Washington DC, where the Parkland, Florida students and families, were joined by an estimated 800,000 people including celebrities like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, and Jennifer Hudson who lost her mother, brother, and nephew in a 2008 shooting. Over the course of the day, youngsters who had experienced gun violence firsthand delivered poignant and articulated messages to the large crowd.” DogoNews.com, March 26, 2018. Parkland students traveled the United States, testified before Congress and held anti-gun rallies across the nation… new activists in the war against ubiquitous assault rifles and lax gun ownership laws. A year later, more killings, but US gun laws remain unchanged.

On September 20^th, all stemming from the passionate and consistent message of now 16-year-old Greta Thunberg (pictured above, early in her crusade), perhaps the most articulate spokesperson against global underreaction to climate change, millions of young people marched in protest all over the world. New York, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Washington, etc., etc. Speaking at the U.N. 

Climate Change Conference on September 23^rd, the young activist noted: “‘This is all wrong,’ Thunberg said, reading from a piece of paper. ‘I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you.’

“‘People are suffering,’ the 16-year-old continued through tears. ‘People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?’

“‘How dare you continue to look away and come here saying you are doing enough,’ Thunberg added. ‘You say you hear us and understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.’” Yahoo.com, September 23^rd. Donald Trump came into the hall for 10 minutes after Thunberg had finished her presentation… and then left. He wanted nothing to do with any climate change initiative.

Instead, he inveigled his way to meeting with other world leaders, and issued this self-congratulatory moment to the press the 23^rd: “President Trump told reporters at the United Nations Monday [9/23] that while he was deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize, he didn’t expect to be awarded one.

“‘I think I’m going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t,’ Trump said following a bilateral meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.

“As do many U.S. conservatives, Trump then voiced frustration that former President Barack Obama received the award in 2009…. ‘Well, they gave one to Obama immediately upon his ascent to the presidency and he had no idea why he got it,’ Trump said despite not being asked about his predecessor… ‘You know what, that was the only thing I agreed with him on.’” Yahoo.com. The notion of Mr Trump’s receiving any bona fide international acclaim is at best amusing, perhaps more reflective of a man who has predicated his success on delusion and fake news.

Perhaps, Trump and his “whatever Trump wants” Republican Party should heed the warning young Thunberg gave that if those in charge did not solve the climate change crisis, younger and future generations would never forgive them. What do Parkland students and climate change followers of Greta Thunberg have in common? They are truly the voices of the Z and younger generations, a unifying definition of the future global constituency. In the United States, Democrats may be blasted by not doing enough, but Republicans will be decimated when those younger generations rise to vote and take charge. Those who cannot deal with appropriate gun control and the devastation of climate change will be marginalized and shoved onto the ash-heap of history’s failures.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and acting righteous when you are absolutely on the wrong side of history never goes well for those with failed vision and false policies.