On Friday, September 20th, I joined students such as myself to attend a school strike and a march for our lives. We marched for the end of single use plastic, we marched for the end of fossil fuels, we marched for the end of changing climates and rising sea levels, we marched for them. We marched for the elementary school kids cheering us on with posters of their own as we marched by their school. We marched for the kids who want to be doctors, journalists, waitresses, or whatever (excuse my French) the fuck they want to be. Because they have that right, but right now that right is being threatened, for some, that right wasn’t even an option. Kids should be worrying which tree to climb next, not where the closest source of clean water is. They should dream about what they want to be when they grow up, and not live in a nightmare which is their soon to be uninhabitable home. They should be learning how to live, not how to survive.
There’s a lot the average joe can do to help, as Mitchel Musso so beautifully stated in his 2000s hit “The Three R’s”: reduce, reuse, recycle. Try to bring/use reusable water bottles, grocery bags, containers etc wherever and whenever you can. I know that’s not always convenient but neither is not being able to breath outside (kids with asthma are already facing the effects of climate change). Compost, compost, compost, with food you can compost about anything and everything besides dairy and certain meats. I know it can be smelly, but a lot of towns have drop off zones, and hey i’m sure it smells a lot better than toxic waste. There’s a lot you can do to help (which I will follow up about in an upcoming article), but there’s also a lot not to do so make sure you’re aware about what not to recycle or compost.
Truthfully, at the end of the day it’s up to our policy makers and big businesses to be the ones to change and shift our culture. But it’s on us to hold them accountable for their inactions and take back our dreams and our future. This wouldn’t be an article about climate activism if I didn’t quote the sensational Greta Thumberg, “We need to get angry and understand what is at stake. And then we need to transform that anger into action and stand together united and just never give up”. This is why we march and this is why we will continue to march until action is done. We must march for ourselves and for the generations to come because their future is just as worthy as ours, their future is our future and our future trumps your convenience.