Greta Thunberg has been making headlines globally within the past month. The 16-year-old Swedish activist began her environmental campaign in August 2018 when she protested the Swedish parliament for immediate action to combat the damaging effects of climate change and has now traveled outside of Sweden to spread awareness.
You may have seen videos and reports on her speech in front of the United Nations earlier this week. One giant take away from her emotional speech was when she told these global leaders:
"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?"
As her speech continues she tells the world leaders that they are failing the younger generations and that "You have stolen my childhood and my dreams with your empty words."
Let me be clear: what Thunberg is doing is amazing work. Maybe more of us need a wake-up call about the damage we are causing our planet and what we need to do to stop it, but the fact that a child is quite literally begging adults to do something is absurd. She shouldn't have to do this, yet she was put in a position where it seemed like the only option.
Teenagers, by all means, have the power to change the world, and there's no doubt about that. But for her to do this work because adults are doing quite literally nothing, or at the very least the bare minimum, about a global crisis is embarrassing and pathetic on our part. She is absolutely right: why are we pushing this type of trauma onto a teenager?
Furthermore, in a Twitter thread that has since gone viral, Thunberg wrote "I honestly don't understand why adults would choose to spend their time mocking and threatening teenagers and children for promoting science when they could do something good instead. I guess they must simply feel so threatened by us."
In these tweets, Thunberg is addressing the sheer ludicrousness that is the adults who have gone to social media and other platforms to demean and threaten her. They tell her she is disrespectful when really that is the furthest thing from the truth because it is not her but in fact the adults, who are being disrespectful not only to a teenager but to our nation as a whole for ignoring what she is campaigning for.
This is the same ideology that goes along with Amariyanna Copeny, better known as "Little Miss Flint", the now 12-year-old who began campaigning for clean water in Flint, Michigan five years ago. Literal children have been campaigning what should be just basic human rights, but in a world filled with ignorance, is seen as a privilege.
How dare we look to children for fixing the previous generation's mistakes?
We absolutely should support Thunberg in everything she is doing. She is currently one of the leading voices in the nation who we are listening to and is advocating for something that we should all be caring about. She is initiating change and it's about time someone is doing it, but the fact that it needs to be a teenager for us to listen, and even then for many to still not care about, is extremely concerning.
The world is changing, but why must we risk the childhood of a teenager in order for it to happen?
