Held in Liverpool City Centre
Friday 24th May 2019
Article and photos by John Owen
The Climate protest march through the city from St Luke’s to the top of Liverpool One shopping mall was a sight to behold. Organised by school students, some from Extinction Rebellion, old and young, it challenged the status quo of a quasi indifferent population of media-tech, phone hogging, comfort techs babes, hurtling through life at the speed of the planet through the space-time continuum.
So what’s all the racket? Is there any need to stop my grazing eco-peanuts and café latte, amidst the cathedrals of shopping giants. Can you dig the cool clothes I’m wearing? That’s the majorities statement, so bog off leave me alone. Luckily youth are persistent, and they won’t leave this issue be. Although politicians now say they understand the problem of climate change, can we trust them with the task of tackling it?
But what forces are at play here? The youth pah! What do they know?
To paraphrase some old git who watched the march. “Don’t they know African children walk seven miles to school, there and back, some days carrying their books and desk, and occasionally their teacher too. And in very rare times they have to disassemble the school which they built before home time!
No after school clubs for them, only hard industrial construction jobs, in blistering heat. So don’t give me this sentimental mush about the earth hotting up and the planet dying. Try it from their side you rich white middle class spoilt brats.”
Yet as one of the last speakers said, all people, rich, poor, black, white, religions and nationalities, should drop differences and grasps hands to help save us from extinction. We have evolved thus far from the naked ape, created tools and superabundance, yet the planet is in perpetual turmoil, reflected in the climate and convulsions of the weather.
Some of the speakers: veterans from all kinds of political consciousness, wallop each other with their own ultimate schema: a general strike, a general bleeding strike! Yes nimps, just get all of the unions out, and the young should reproach and castigate the adult leaders and politicians to make them organise the protest. More horse shit than the grand national.
No no! no! no! no! that is not the solution.
Just get a million school students in the country out on the streets leaving schools to organise national school strikes, like the YTS school strikes of the 80s which paralysed most of the city, and caused mayhem, because that’s what’s needed, not organised organisations, but chaos, mayhem and rioting total war at this government and system, until it is shut down, stopped and destroyed.
Then and only then can we begin, only just begin that is, to stop, reflect and see how much damage has been done, and how long the earth will take to heal and reorganise; the world in co-operation, not in competition.
Slimy politicians and blow hard speakers need to bog off. They’re sometime worse than the enemy they allegedly fight. The revolution won’t be stewarded or televised. Sadly armchair revolutionaries abound.
There you go folks, JohnO solved the climate issue, simple as pie.
Unwatch this space.