By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Like it or not, you’ve probably heard of a Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg. She’s the Left’s latest Global Warming prophet. Al Gore has confirmed her promotion to the world stage, declaring that he “was struck by her potent and sobering call to action. Nobody speaks truth to power as she does,” he beams.
Greta enthralls the world’s rich at Davos and the world’s powerful at the United Nations. Millions of children around the world pack the streets and march for her cause. The Daily Show and Ellen feature her. Why, even Barack Obama approves!
Greta wants someone to save her generation from Global Warming. So to whom does she turn?
Why, the United Nations, of course! After all, only the powerful can force the rich to cut the emission of excess “greenhouse gases” to zero, according to Greta. And for some reason, the rich and powerful seem to eat it up.
Oh, but Greta doesn’t trust the powerful. She’s only 16, but she knows her Augustine! That libido dominandi is pretty strong stuff, and them that have it can be pretty selfish now and then.
So Greta goes to the money — at Davos, no less! — to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. She is angry! And there they sit, paralyzed and perplexed, as she shames them for their love of money (yes, she’s up-to-date on her Bible study too).
“My generation will not give up without a fight,” she tells her prestigious audiences, who respond as though she’s actually been elected or something. “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful,” she continues (no, she hasn’t gotten to Aquinas yet . . . why is Augustine so wordy, anyway?).
Wait — Greta wants us to be pessimistic, that’s it! Hope is a theological virtue, after all, and the Global Warmers want nothing to do with that fantasy. And, pessimist that Greta is, she is aghast that we might lapse into a moment of rational reflection. None of that, thank you! So she drives herself into a frenzy and demands that we join her. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she says.
Feelings Will Save The World
OK, in a way, we can feel sorry for her. But it looks like the kids in Sweden have been raised on the same swill that American kids get from our government school unions. Greta has not been taught to think, she has been trained to feel. Especially when it comes to Greta. She has learned to “feel good about yourself,” as the manic mantra goes, and in her book you’re supposed to feel bad about yourself if you don’t feel the same as Greta feels.
“And then I want you to act,” she continues. Well, there’s goes Aquinas again . . . so much for prudence, the Mother of all Virtues. And frankly, Greta is pretty mad at mothers in general. Look at all those powerful men out there cowering in their cushy seats at Davos — why have their wives stood idly by as they recklessly ransack the future of Greta’s generation? Why did they allow their motherly instincts to be shoved aside by their husbands’ lust for power and money?
Well, something like that. On examination, feelings do get a bit muddled, but Greta’s on a roll, so don’t try tripping her up with contradictions. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she says. Perhaps she’s referring to Alice and her encounter with Humpty Dumpty. Humpty has power, so he can use a word to mean just what he chooses it to mean, “neither more nor less.” Is that what Greta means?
Please, no distractions. “The eyes of all future generations are upon you,” she says of the yet unborn.
Ah, Greta. Do you not realize that the rich and powerful arrayed before you are Hell-bent on eliminating those future generations? And those they don’t eliminate, they want to control? If you represent those yet to come, why not speak out in their defense? These gatherings represent the apex of the rich and famous. Why are you silent?
“And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you.”
Our Lady Turned Upside-Down
“Das also war des Pudels Kern!” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I.
“So that’s it!”
What I’ve always found striking about Thunberg is not her familiar message, but the steep trajectory of her carefully manufactured image since she started demonstrating on the sidewalk outside her Swedish high school a mere eighteen months ago. Within weeks she was literally world-famous. She was even named Time’s “Person of the Year.” Why, here was a fifteen-year-old speaking for her generation!
Observing the stage-managed spectacle, the thought occurs, doesn’t this scenario sound eerily familiar?
At Fatima, three children saw our Lady, who asked them to call the world to prayer and repentance. At Lourdes, when the Soubirous sisters told their parents what they had seen and heard, their parents punished them for telling tall tales. When Catherine Labouré told her confessor about our Lady’s desire to foster devotion to the Miraculous Medal, her confessor carefully observed her for two years before taking her story to the archbishop. Even then, he didn’t mention her name. When Lucia and her cousins told of their visions of Our Lady of Fatima, their parents disciplined them; later, they were taken into custody and told to recant.
But nobody doubts Greta, not for a minute. Suddenly the world swoons at her feet.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Picture little Greta Thunberg standing on a Swedish soapbox shouting, “Repent and be saved, or God will judge you!” Had she tried that, she would still be in Sweden and probably hauled into the courts of that socialist paradise for truancy.
But now, God won’t judge us, Greta will.
Somehow, when Greta appeared on the scene demanding that the United Nations take control of the world’s economy and, by necessity, its political institutions as well, the usual suspects on the Left jumped up and cheered.
Here they had their necessary antidote to God’s judgment, and their secular imprimatur for total power.
And their gospel? They stole our Lady’s saving narrative and turned it upside-down.
It’s all there. The message to the world’s children is clear. Genesis has it backwards — Greta has it right:
“Save the world, not your souls! Don’t be fruitful! Don’t multiply! And don’t take dominion over the creatures of the earth. Let them take dominion over you!
“And who better to represent them than these rich and famous people who have made me such a superstar!”
Greta has denied the theological virtues, ignored the cardinal virtues, and turned the moral virtues on their head.
Mission accomplished.
Even when it was revealed that Greta’s father was writing her material, no one was fazed. Who cares? It didn’t bother anyone. Is she terrorized? Manipulated? So what? Greta is a useful prop in a power struggle that will continue long after the apocalypse she pretends to predict. What does it matter that, in the immortal words of Mr. Justice Goldberg, her campaign is “a gross canard, cut out of whole cloth”?
And who is the most cunning of all spirits whose angry, spiteful army marches under the banner of the libido dominandi?
Faust had it right. “So that’s it!!!”
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