On This Day in History: June 23

Greta Thunberg speaks to the United Nations

Subscribers can listen to the audio of this post here.

When Greta Thunberg was 15, she was supposed to be in school learning to become a good little consumer of planetary resources. Instead, she was protesting the lack of action on climate change outside Swedish Parliament. And hordes of pasty penis possessors from o’er the land collectively fudged their undergarments and unleashed the ALL CAPS fury, screeching like howler monkeys on a meth bender.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 23, 2019--

Born in Stockholm in 2003, by the age of eight Greta became obsessed over so little being done about an issue critical to the fate of humanity. In the spring of 2018, she won a climate change essay prize hosted by a Swedish newspaper, writing, “I want to feel safe. How can I feel safe when I know we are in the greatest crisis in human history?” Greta tried to organize a school strike, but when she couldn’t get any takers, went ahead and did it by herself.

The following August, after Sweden experienced the hottest summer in 262 years resulting in massive wildfires, Greta launched her protest. Rather than return to school, she protested alone outside Parliament each day until the September 9 elections, often in the rain, demanding her government follow the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions. On the first day, she posted a photo of her campaign on social media and the internet responded, sharing it widely.

After the election she returned to school but continued to protest every Friday. She soon began attending demonstrations and speaking publicly across Europe while mobilizing her rapidly growing social media following to take action. At Greta’s urging, over 20,000 students had held similar climate protests in hundreds of cities around the world that December. The following spring the Guardian wrote about “The Greta Thunberg Effect” and the young Swede made the cover of TIME Magazine as a “Next Generation Leader.” Later that summer, she sailed across the Atlantic in a much-publicized carbon-neutral voyage to New York. The following month, on September 23, 2019, she addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, yet I'm one of the lucky ones,” she spoke to them. “People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing.” Holding back tears, she chastised world leaders for embracing “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” Toward the end she stabbed at them: “The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”

“How dare you?” she said to them. Four times during her four-and-a-half-minute speech she asked the same question about their lack of action: “How dare you?”

In the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, to dozens of heads of state, business leaders, and senior representatives of civil society, Greta repeated those three words while being broadcast on live television to the world.

“How dare you?”

Subscribe for access to cool shit:

VOLUME II NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!

Get Volumes I and II of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN