Greta is my granddaughter

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Not literally, of course, but she represents the next stage of evolution of humanity. I do have a step-granddaughter, a few years younger than Greta Thunberg, and I have pictures of her giving that “Don’t try to fool me with phoney platitudes” stare, as she looks past me into the future, where she and her cohort will be in charge.

Not literally, of course, but she represents the next stage of evolution of humanity. I do have a step-granddaughter, a few years younger than Greta Thunberg, and I have pictures of her giving that “Don’t try to fool me with phoney platitudes” stare, as she looks past me into the future, where she and her cohort will be in charge.
I’ve felt that way most of my life, knowing from an early age that the Great American Dream we post-WWII Boomers were presented wasn’t viable in the long run. The notions that war was a solution, that a lifelong job and a static little cubbyhole was all anyone should hope for, that the world was divided up into nations, religions and races, and that they should compete and fight with one another— all this will vanish like a sand castle washed by a tsunami. But I, like many of my generation, have become comfortably numb in a warm security blanket of delusion.
Along comes Greta and thousands of other students saying “We’re tired of being shot down in schools; seeing the natural world devastated by petroleum fumes and plastic garbage; being educated for non-existent jobs in an illusory economy which won’t be there when we finish school.” The dinosaur regime that holds money sacred above all else is doomed and Greta’s generation is the asteroid that will wipe it out.
But in the meanwhile, the dinosaurs will be thrashing about like stegosaurus with their spiked tails, loudly proclaiming that only they, with their billions of dollars, tanks, weapons and lawyers, can save the world from evil— the evil that is them; many creatures have gone extinct at the hand of developers, mad quests for oil and gold, and divisive politics of fear.
The hyper-rich can never be satisfied, and the hyper-poor can never be adequately fed and housed. Such an imbalance of the world’s wealth cannot last, and the best we can hope for is to not be in the way when the excrement collides with the oscillator.
Or, we can chip away at the imbalance and dismantle it the same way it was
constructed; piece-by-piece.

Robert Wills
SHAWVILLE/THORNE