Appetite for Change at the Boston Youth Climate Strike
This article was written by Emma Zimmerman in collaboration with the Sunrise Movement Boston media team.
If you climbed off the red line at Park Street on Friday, May 3, you may have assumed it was any average spring day in the city. You may have seen a few tour guides in colonial garb leading school groups through the Freedom Trail or heard the fading bustle of morning commuters. Yet, as you walked up the Boston Common hill, you would hear a new sound beginning to materialize. Slowly, you would notice the whistle of kazoos, then you would hear chanting. Finally, you would see it: a crowd of high school and middle school students lining the State House steps, repeating “hey hey, ho ho, climate change has got to go!” and holding signs high above their heads.
For the second time in less than two months, Massachusetts Climate Strike and the Sunrise Movement had joined forces to organize an array of speakers, share stories and argue for the necessity of a Green New Deal. Just like the previous climate strike, various high schoolers and state legislators took the stage. Yet unlike the previous climate strike, one group in particular caught my eye: an elementary school teacher who had traveled to the strike with about fifteen of her fourth-grade students.
A line of pigtails, sweatshirts, and pastel sneakers held cardboard and construction paper signs with words that declared “We love our mother. Do you?” and “Change climate change!” as the teacher leaned towards the microphone to address us.
“I am so glad that I get to spend my day with people who are younger, wiser, and more passionate than us grown-ups, and I have total confidence that we are going to turn this around because of these people right here,” she declared, gesturing towards the young people that surrounded her.
With that, the young activists began to chant, “no more oil, no more coal, climate justice is our goal!” as the crowd — five, ten, even fifty years older than them–vigorously joined in. In front of me stood our future: a motley bunch with sheepish smiles and lopsided magic-marker earths; scruffy for sure. But, if that is what our future looks like — Crayola marks and lopsided letters — it’s not so bad, is it?
Sure, it might look a little messy, but what part of life isn’t messy? What part of life isn’t complicated? Decisions will always appear chaotic for at least a little while. The most well-laid policies were once haphazard marks on a senator’s notebook, maybe scrawled in the middle of a sleepless night.
The Green New Deal was constructed through a three-hour lunch meeting between Senator Ed Markey, a 72-year-old man of Irish Catholic decent from Massachusetts and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year old Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx and the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress. Nothing about the creation of the Green New Deal was expected — no crossed t’s and dotted i’s. But just like those fourth graders, all the Green New Deal needs is someone who believes in its possibility, supporting it and making sure it evolves continuously until it becomes the future.
In October 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change reported that we have only twelve years to keep global warming at a maximum of 1.5C. Beyond that point, the slightest heating will cause an increase in severe floods, drought, and other extreme weather conditions, and lead to poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
If we spend too long crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, we miss out on the crucial time period to act. We tell our kids that their future is not worth it because it’s too messy, too complicated, and it would take too much effort to ensure. The Green New Deal and fourth graders metaphor is not a stretch, because the two are one and the same. If we do not enact the Green New Deal, we are stealing our children’s future.
“Congress are you listening?” asked Anoushka Oke, a sophomore at Arlington High School, during her speech at the May 3 strike. Later, I met up with Anoushka to talk about her powerful call to action and her use of art as climate activism. She described her most recent piece of artwork, a three-paneled piece depicting various ways we humans continue to harm our planet. When I asked Anoushka who or what most inspires her, she did not hesitate. “Probably my family,” she said. “My mom and dad really encouraged me to come here to speak. They’re supporting me this entire time. They really wish they could have been here too. I had people record [the speech] so I could show them.”
All the young activist needed was someone behind her, someone telling her that her vision for a better future was worth it. That she was worth it. And isn’t that what we all need?
In her powerful video, “A Message from the Future,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks from the future to tell us that the first big step to enacting the Green New Deal is “closing our eyes and imagining it…we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”
Imagine the ideal future for your child, your grandchild, your niece or your nephew. I bet it looks like a secure job, a clean environment, safety from disasters, healthy food to eat, and clean water to drink. It looks a lot like the Green New Deal, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t dream of telling that child that their future wasn’t possible, so how could you say that about the Green New Deal?
As the speeches began to wind down on May 3, the leaders of the demonstration asked all of us to sit down and take eleven minutes of silence, signifying the eleven years left to prevent extreme climate catastrophe. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement: the fourth-grade teacher had pulled a Ziploc of granola bars out of her backpack and began offering one to each of her cross-legged activists, who were suddenly a bit restless. Little hands reached for the rectangular packets that would sustain them through eleven minutes of imagining. After all, the future was hungry, and it was snack time.
This article was originally published in the Somerville Journal.
