Friday 20th September, around the world, people took part in the Global Climate Strikes.
Were you there?
Did you strike? Did your kids? Did your kids’ schools do anything?
Weren’t the scenes of the strikes around the world so inspiring and energising? In particular the picture of the strike @gretathunberg posted happening in Afghanistan.
This is, as she says, a globally emergency. And it seemed on Friday that we came together around the world to acknowledge this and lobby politicians and big businesses to do more.
Sadly, I wasn’t there. My 7YO was off school ill with a cold. I was gutted. But I did my best to represent on social media, from my back garden.
Does striking from doing the housework count?? ;-)
I also ummed and ahhhed (before 7YO was ill) about taking the girls.
But our school did us so proud and took the day off from the curriculum, and spent it writing poetry, making posters, discussing the issues and campaigning to plant 1,000 trees on behalf of the school. What is happening to our planet is not normal, and how the kids spent the day was not how they normally do.
They found the right balance of seriousness, mixed with activism, without creating an overload of eco-anxiety on primary school kids. For me, it was perfect.
Our children are having to worry about so much more than we ever had to worry about. I know I never worried about the future of the planet when I was growing up. And that can be incredibly scary and bring about an underlying anxiety, and existential questioning that we just didn't experience until perhaps into our teens. Greta is in fact 16, and ours are still 'babies' at primary school.
So do worry about the impact of environmental anxiety on them.
THAT SAID..... sadly is there any other choice??
Our children are the leaders of tomorrow, of today(!) and we are living in extraordinary times. They need to learn and they need to be inspired to act and change, because the changes we need to make as a species will affect them, and they will have to make sacrifices we didn't have to. And so that is why I was so grateful to our school for finding a path through all of this to impress on them the importance, to give them an outlet to act, but not to terrify them.
Me being me, I rang the school up after we got home to congratulate them on how they had spent the day. I felt very grateful.
How did you spend Friday? I'd love to hear more.
As always, with love from our family to yours,
Elena x
Find out more:
- Fridays for Future Organisation - https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/
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