The Climate Strike

The climate strike has brought out the worst in many old men. If anything, the pettiness and cowardice of current ruling-class and pundit discourse has grown even more toxic, and all because many young people have decided to fight back instead of to sit back and swallow corporate garbage.

For my part, I believe these young people are too late, but I refuse to mock them; I refuse to block their way, because I would rather see us die standing for a human cause, than die staring at the mindless robot flickers of a cell phone.

I Know

Yes, I know: posting as I do on this website is playing the lyre as Rome burns. I feel the tension of this awareness every moment of the day. It forces me to question why I bother to write, why I bother to get up in the morning, why I bother to do anything.

I have no excuse for acting as if our modern age were somehow normal, but I do have one explanation. In a few years, I'll be dead. When I was younger, I did as much as I could (within legal means) to prevent the sort of world in which we now find ourselves. I protested, I participated in committees, I mailed off books and pamphlets, I was arrested. But I'm not young any more, and nothing that I did back then has made a speck of difference.

Any hope for a different world, any hope for human survival, will have to come from young people with better ideas for protest and activism than I was able to put forward. I failed; they will have to succeed, or die. The task is theirs.

And so, if I talk about symphonies, or films, or poems, or short stories, please understand that these posts are indications of my failure. If I had better things to offer the world, I would share them.