Girls Can Change the World
“We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.“
- Greta Thunberg, 16 year old student and activist, at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24)
In December I heard about a young Swedish girl who fights for the climate. As many people around the world did, I also listened to her speech at the COP24 and was deeply moved. I gave the video a thumbs up and continued preparing for Christmas. A month later, however, on the 17th of January, Greta Thunberg came back to my mind.
In December I loved how Greta said that “change is coming,” but I didn’t believe that it would really happen. On the morning of the 18th of January, I could see the change that she described a month ago. I was one of 30,000 German students who took part in the first national school strike which was held in different parts of the country on this Friday. We were all afraid of the consequences of this strike, as none of us is the kind of student who likes to get in trouble. None of us had the courage to go on strike alone like Greta did, but within one night we became a huge group of students. We are not alone anymore — and together we became the powerful wave of change that Greta always seemed to know would come. And we now can see she is ready to take this wave.
We arrived early in the morning. It was dark and really cold, even though I wore a woolly hat, scarf, and gloves, and the area in front of Hamburg’s town hall was totally empty. With two of my friends I waited for something to happen while the sun rose above the skyline of our city. We started to panic and seriously considered going back to school and pretending we were just late when suddenly little groups of students came from every direction. They carried posters saying “Make the world GRETA again” and “There is no Planet B.” In 30 minutes the area in front of our town hall was filled with 1,500 students yelling at the politicians and singing protest songs.
Suddenly it wasn’t us who was panicking but the two policemen who were supposed to save the town hall. We felt strong. We didn’t care about our teachers and the lessons we missed anymore. The only thing we cared about is our future. Fifteen hundred students freezing for the climate. Singing together. Dancing together. Being angry together. Without any adult asking us to do so. Teachers, headmasters, and politicians tried to ban the strikes — without any success. We shared a passion and a dream and we all knew that it wouldn’t be the last protest.
Today we don’t ask about the consequences of the school strike anymore. We just ask about the consequences of NOT taking part in the school strike. Scientists have told us that the sea level is rising, whole countries will be flooded, and hundreds of species will die. The air gets more and more polluted and the water is already poisoned. There will be hunger and war, crying babies, and dying sisters and brothers. We will have more refugees all over the world than we have today, even though we already have more refugees today than we ever had before.
That’s not the future I want for myself and not the future I want for my children. I want peace and unity, international friendships, and people who don’t have to worry about the most essential things in life. I’m not able to ban cars, shut down coal fired power stations or stop the pollution of our oceans. But I can take my right as a citizen of a democratic European country to ask our politicians to finally act in my interests. And I can get louder until I scream if they’re not listening to me.
At the most recent protest on Friday someone told me that students don’t have a voice. But that’s wrong. We do have a voice, we just need someone who listens. And thanks to Greta Thunberg that’s about to change. We have the courage to be loud enough to be heard and we won’t stop getting louder and louder until they finally start to act. This movement has participants all over the world now and it grows with every single minute. I personally take part in this movement because I want my grandchildren to learn about the climate crisis in history class. And as Greta said, I want to give real answers when they ask me “Granny, what did you do?”
