School students are being recruited and organised to strike from school this Friday, 15 March. The website, schoolstrike4climate.com claims the purpose is “to tell our politicians to take our future seriously and treat climate change for what it is – a crisis.”
After careful analysis of historical trends and with far more reliability than a United Nations’ “scientific consensus”, I’m prepared to boldly predict the political climate will not be warmed or cooled one-tenth of a degree by kids striking. Like all prophets of the apocalypse, their furious little feet stamping and rosy cheeks pouting will be an indulgent but futile activity with consistently little impact in the real world.
The Labor-Greens coalition will still be environmental extremists denying developing nations cheap, reliable electricity and aspiring to deliver Australians intermittent electricity at any cost.
The Liberal-National coalition will still be lukewarm environmental realists while chasing irrational voters from the centre-left with only half the moonbattery the Greens boast.
Real grownups will observe there’s a reason school kids aren’t allowed to get married, sign contracts, fight for their nation, get a driver’s licence, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco products, or vote on matters of national importance. Their developing brains aren’t mature enough to weigh the balance of evidence, consider all the consequences and make objectively rational decisions. They can barely cross the road safely or wear clothes properly. They are important, but they are children – undeveloped clumps of cells, if you prefer.
The student strike will achieve absolutely nothing but the squealing delight of the overwhelming majority to be free of classes for a few precious hours and maybe get on TV.It would be noteworthy if they were protesting on their weekend, giving up fast food or their smartphones and game consoles in an action that demonstrated real commitment. But skipping school – who cares? They’re only hurting themselves. Real grownups will dismiss the student strike as cute but the homogenous, weightless opinion of unqualified individuals.
Our education system has its work cut out for it competing with the results of such famous contributors to the global intelligence as Kazakhstan. Kids in our education system need as much class time as possible being taught how to think. Literacy would be a good start, of course, but the nationalised curriculum would then be at risk of kids understanding ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, and that simply would not do.
Instead, Comrade Shorten and similar ministers for propaganda will applaud the good little people and with hands clasped together in adoration will extol the virtues of their global citizenship. They will bask in the warmth of his praise and in scenes reminiscent of that skit from the Life of Brian will chorus as one, “Yes, we’re all individuals.”
Sadly, they’re not. They’re lemmings who haven’t been taught about the Roman warm period or the mini ice age in documented history preceding human industry. No one has told them that Greenland, now covered in ice, used to be covered in crops or that Britain used to have a wine industry. No one has told them that ancient aboriginals walked to Tasmania from what is now the mainland before the seas rose hundreds of metres.
They actually believe it’s indisputable by anyone of credible qualification that modern human industry has the ability to significantly impact short or long term global climate patterns. Consequently, they very well may furrow their brows and even lose sleep when globalist ideologues gravely warn them of a climate “crisis” that can magically be solved by international wealth redistribution schemes demanded at UN HQ.
These poor children are being manipulated by environmental fundamentalists to fulfil the role of ‘useful idiots’, both metaphorically as pawns in agendas, they remain oblivious to, and literally by their absenteeism from whatever education they might have hoped for were they in class (instead of a creeping socialist revolution). Our education system is producing obedient drones who don’t think for themselves and so question the new status quo. Instead, they aspire to junk degrees like The History of Feminist Interpretative Dance Theory and uncritically supporting ‘progressive’ government agendas.
I forecast there’ll be lots of soundbites on Friday night of little cuties saying exactly what the mainstream media is already preaching: condemning the sins of a conservative government and sighing their despair for the grim future they’ll inherit. Their parents will beam proudly as they announce coming along was entirely their offspring’s idea and the echo of their own politics just a coincidence. The ‘progressive’ politicians will cynically insist we should listen to these children who they’ll assert are wiser than every last one of the politicians they oppose.
But nothing in the political climate will change. It’ll be just another day with the Opposition opposing the Government; another 24 hours of ‘progressives’ demanding economic upheaval at the risk of imminent catastrophe; and yet another day of conservatives attempting to point out the evidence to the contrary to be summarily dismissed by ‘progressives’ as merely the lone voices of incompetent ‘deniers’.
As surely as the earth will keep spinning the global climate will keep changing as it always has for millennia and as it always will, and with as little regard for the little humans inhabiting it as the body politic will for kids skipping class.
