It was a long time, from the moment we first heard them yelling, to the moment they appeared round the corner. We were standing in front of the Senate House, an unsociable crowd, students all there for the same reason but not quite familiar enough with each other to interact much. Someone was standing on a stone bench giving a speech. There would be a couple of speeches, they said, and then we’d all move to one side to cheer the school strikers as they came past. But even before the first speaker had really got going, we started to hear them chanting.
We could hear them chanting, and we were looking round, expecting to see them coming, and the speaker was fitting her speech in anyway, checking notes on her phone. It was a long time, and we’d all looked round once or twice, grinning, before they appeared round the corner, marching down Trinity Street with their placards in the air and a wide banner in front of them, chanting. It’s something about the higher pitch, isn’t it, said the student standing next to me. Yes, it’s giving me chills. And we moved back to stand nearer the Senate House fence as the children and teenagers hit the end of Trinity Street and marched over the cobbles.
It’s something about the higher pitch, and it’s something about the fact that we could hear them for such a long time before they appeared. It’s something about the way they were yelling. It’s something about the fact that they came in all sizes and ages, and all mixed up: not the long loping teenagers in one place, and the excited-puppy-like younger children in another place, and the pushchairs and parents and tiny children in another place, but all of them together. It’s something about the fact that it might have been a school crocodile and it might have been a mob and it was neither, it was children and teenagers and parents striding out in a long, shapeless, raggedly arranged crowd that went on and on and on. It’s something about the fact that I’ve often thought of these particular streets as oppressively, dispiritingly, university ground; the fact that you see procession after procession of students in gowns led under the weight of tradition to the Senate House for graduation; and here instead was the energy and anger of the city’s young people, claiming their own earth. Whose future? OUR FUTURE. Whose future? OUR FUTURE.
It’s something about the way they were all yelling together, and something about the way some of them yelled on their own: two very small little girls holding a sign between them, shouting WHAT DO WE WANT? CLIMATE JUSTICE, but with voices too small to get anyone else joining in. Something about the parents who were there with their children; something about the children who were there on their own, teenagers, clambering up onto the Guildhall window-ledges to take photos across the crowd. Something about the way you have to strain to listen to a child at the mic because they haven’t quite figured out how close to hold it. Something about the ten-year-old I saw on a news clip afterwards, saying that he’d like to see the government become more adultish.
It’s something about the way the kids’ message is pure and simple and direct. The university students were mixing it up, of course, shouting things like ‘one two three four tax the rich and feed the poor’; maybe the schoolkids were too and I didn’t notice. And there was someone handing out leaflets: ‘Stop climate change and Brexit at the same time? People’s Vote march on the 23rd?’ But I think most people were there for the earth, for the poor, for the polar bears, and for themselves. It’s a bigger deal than any other deal (or lack of deal); much as I’d like to tax the rich to feed the poor, and stop Brexit, really when the climate’s at stake, we ought to be able to all agree.
I’m not really a protests person. I tend to loiter on the edges of things. I loitered on the edges of the preparations for the big march in Moscow after Boris Nemtsov was shot, and witnessed a Reuters news team pausing for a coffee break. I came across a protest or two in the early stages of the Ukraine crisis, and took photos of them, playing at being a photojournalist. I was a foreigner there anyway: but standing in the streets holding placards and yelling is not really something I myself do. Two weeks ago, when I stumbled on an Extinction Rebellion demonstration, I stood and watched and wondered why it felt like observing a new form of religion. Somehow, climate justice is one issue where I feel I shouldn’t be too fussy about the groups who are standing up for it. Somehow, at the same time, I’m still unwilling to inch too close to a group which invites everyone to come to a party dressed as their spirit animal, or which proposes to deal with the difficult emotions raised by these issues via the healing power of ecstatic dance. I’m pro dance. Very much pro dance. But I have a religion already, and any other groups that want to give me a spiritual framework and a sense of inclusion apparently make me want to run for the hills.
If others like that sort of thing, of course, then all power to them. Maybe we all have to answer the question, what can I do, in our own way. Greta Thunberg wants us to panic, meaning, take action: unfortunately, for me panicking never leads to action: panicking leads to stasis, in the library, say, where I’m supposed to be reading about Major Beniowski’s Phrenotypic Alphabet and other Victorian mnemonic techniques, but have instead been reading a Guardian article about climate change, and will have to take a mental step back and realise that I’m hungry and therefore hanxious and go outside for a sandwich so that I can crack on with Major Beniowski’s Phrenotypic Alphabet, which is, in one sense, the most immediately necessary task to be undertaken that day, even if not even slightly necessary in any other sense to the general well-being of the planet and its inhabitants.
For me, rightly or wrongly, climate change action needs to be dispassionate, and it needs to come in smallish chunks that I can take on without being previously tripped up by anxiety; some of which anxiety might be laziness in this case, of course, but it’s hard to tell in the middle of it. Supporting the school strike seemed to fit these criteria. It was very, very moving, but it wasn’t about me or my emotions (and didn’t noticeably involve ecstatic dance). I would support the idea of children’s voices being heard in society in any case; even more so as they have sensibly picked such an important issue to shout about. This is what democracy looks like was another of the student chants. I don’t really have an opinion on what democracy looks like, but I know who it’s said you’re meant to become like to enter the kingdom of heaven. When the children come out yelling, somehow, it just feels kind of right as an adult to get in line. So even I could stand there with a placard, shyness, awkwardness, laziness and Victorian mnemonic techniques notwithstanding. I don’t know if I’ll manage it again, but I hope so. WHOSE FUTURE? I didn’t actually join in with that chant, although it is my future too, and all of our futures, and the present of some of the poorest people on the planet. I wanted it to be the youngest people yelling OUR FUTURE. Whose future? Their future. Their future. Their future.
Mome Raths and Mended Rhymes 