Teenage Wasteland: Why Study When ‘The World Is Ending’?
Jamie Margolin [pictured], a high school senior who co-founded This Is Zero Hour and sued her home state of Washington for causing climate change, said at a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Wednesday that she and other teens are told to plan for the future but wonder why when “the world is ending.”
“It’s just really hard to grow up in a world of ‘ifs,’” said Margolin, who told the committee that, like some of the other young witnesses, she suffers from “anxiety issues.”
“I don’t think a lot of people in Congress understand the conversations that are happening every day in American high schools,” Margolin said.
Margolin said she and her peers suffer from “constant looming uncertainty” because of climate change.
“Kids are joking, like, what is even, like, the point … the world is ending,” Margolin said. “What are we studying for? What are we doing?”
“Right now it’s like some members of government and corporations are actively pointing a gun to children’s futures, actively making it worse, actively going out of their way to support corporations and poison us and destroy our future and that is horrifying and it feels like a betrayal,” Margolin said. “It’s like a knife to the heart.”
Margolin said in her prepared testimony that her mother is an immigrant from Columbia.
“I will never get to experience that harmony and paradise on earth that she did,” Margolin said. “I know foreign affairs deals with international development, but this whole idea of development is backwards [sic].”
“We think that development means big cities and lots of money, but in reality places like where my Abuela grew up are just as rich as any American metropolis,” Margolin said.
“I want the entirety of Congress, in fact, the whole U.S. government, to remember the fear and despair that my generation lives with every day, and I want you to hold onto it,” Margolin said in her opening remarks.
“How do I even begin to convey to you what it feels like to know that within my lifetime the destruction that we have already seen from the climate crisis will only get worse?”
“The fact that you are staring at a panel of young people testifying before you today pleading for a livable Earth should not fill you with pride, it should fill you with shame,” Margolin said.
Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg also testified at the hearing, although she did not read an opening statement but instead presented the committee with a United Nations report on climate change.
Thunberg started the Fridays for Future school walkout movement and will be a featured speaker at the United Nations at its climate summit next week.
The hearing unfolded mostly along party lines, with Republicans pointing out how it is countries like China and India that are contributing the most to pollution in the world and that the United States is a top steward of its land and resources at cutting carbon emissions.
Democrats said that climate change is the greatest threat facing the world.
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Pierre D. Bernier
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@Jamie Margolin [pictured]
“It’s just really hard to grow up in a world of ‘ifs,’”
Hey jamie…. Blame it on the alarmists not on real science !!! Go do your home work !
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Tom O
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What a HUGE cop out for being lazy and not wanting to study. So what is so damn different about growing up with the “climate apocalypse” hanging over your head or the “nuclear winter” that I grew up under? Not a damn bit of difference, little girl, other than the fact that yours, no matter what happens, leaves a world that survives and the nuclear winter would have left cockroaches and rabbits. You are too pampered and ignorant. We learned because life is not a given, and all things are uncertain. We all live under the continuous threat of an errant asteroid hitting Earth. Are we all going to curl up in a ball, suck our thumbs, and pretend that life isn’t fair and the damn older generation is at fault? No. We all grew up and recognized that tomorrow was never guaranteed by man, nature, or God. It is about time you did, too.
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Pierre D. Bernier
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Amen to that !!! (Someone old enough to know what you’re talking about is right on)
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Chris Marcil
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This is hilarious. The dems must be rolling on the floor, and in awe of their grief inspiration. The new era of nazism that they are inspiring is well on its way. The use of false science in order to control the masses, discriminate and exterminate those that they see as unfit is in place. They have already said that they are making a least of undesirables. Ready for step two?
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Herb Rose
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With what is being “taught” in schools today children would learn more useful information by not going. A person will learn what they need to know as their interest dictates. Today’s schools are about the system telling students what they should believe, what they should know, and what they should be interested in. The whole system of public schools is flawed because they are not about the children but preserving a failing system.
When I went to school a (long time ago) college was not for everybody. There were flunk out courses where those who either didn’t have the intelligence or wouldn’t do the work, were weeded out. Back then a college degree was an indication of some abilities. Students who could not keep your grades up to the standards of their major would transferred to the College of Education enabling them to continue in school. It was not the brightest and best who were becoming teachers.
Today’s universities will accept anyone who can pay the tuition and keep them in school as long as they can, by letting them major in the most ridiculous areas. Most of today’s degrees are meaningless as a measurement of abilities or knowledge. (I recently met an English Major graduate who didn’t know what a pronoun was. She was an english teacher at a middle school.)
The only position where these degrees mean anything is as a teacher or other government employee where abilities don’t mater only qualifications.
Is it any wonder that these systems are only about preserving the present system and the jobs of the people employed (not government workers who are different from government employees.) otherwise many would be unable to pay off their student loans or survive on their abilities.
I have faith that the world will survive this current “disastrous generation” just as it survived my “disastrous generation” and all the prior and subsequent ones. It will be because people and kids remain the same despite what the systems try to do to them.
Herb
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Graeme Mochrie
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In the 60’s and 70’s there was a belief that we were moving towards a leisure society. This did not materialise, or did it? I read an interesting article recently which suggested that over fifty percent of jobs were bullshit jobs i.e. they have no real purpose other than to extend the empire and the ego of the boss. Over fifty percent of people interviewed couldn’t see the point in what they were doing, but turned up because they needed to feed families. These tended to be the better paid jobs in society, with real work being done by poor paid people. Our children now stay in education for much longer, many doing hobby degrees that are meaningless in society and ensure them jobs on the supermarket checkout, our of daddy is connected a bullshit job in a corporation where they get well paid for making tea.
Perhaps we need to accept that we have left the 19th century behind and begin to distribute the real labour equatibly across society, dispense with bullshit jobs and let everyone work a bit and everyone enjoy a lot more leisure.
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rod
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You know? Is it time to scare them in the other direction with reality?
“Lots of you kids are going to die from the cold and wet that is almost here. And a lot of it is because Congress won’t prepare for it. They don’t even care. They don’t want to know anything about the sun’s cooling down for the next 70 years or so. The sun’s cooling happens naturally all the time. Happened the last time 375 years ago, when the Maunder Minimum hit. Millions died from it then in Europe. Couldn’t grow food. Couldn’t feed themselves. Froze. Starved. Got sick. Died.
The sun cools down periodically, maybe only two or three tenths of a percent. The earth receives less energy. But that reduction of energy is enough to bring on immense cold.
And too, at the same time, the number of sunspots decreases, and the Solar Wind (charged particles), stops being ejected into space from the location of sunspots like before. And the sun’s magnetic field system gets weaker and doesn’t reach out into space like it did. Both the Solar Wind and the sun’s magnetic field… when they’re strong… interfere greatly with cosmic rays from outer space. But now we’re headed into a prolonged period of their being weaker, which causes less interference with cosmic rays.
Incoming cosmic rays have been increasing. They cause cloudiness. More cosmic rays getting through to our atmosphere, because they aren’t intercepted out in space by the sun’s magnetic field and Solar Wind, means more cloudiness and wet and cold. It may soon be too cold and wet to produce as much food as before. And we now have eleven times the number of mouths to feed as during the disastrous Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715.
Like I say, Congress doesn’t care. They don’t even know about Svensmark and Zharkova. Look them up… become aware.”
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Herb Rose
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Hi Rod,
If you really want to scare them show them the bill for the billions of dollars wasted on this fraud and explain to them that they will be paying it.
Herb
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rod
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Hah! Yeah. But then some economyth in Congress, running for president, will tell them “I’ll wipe out your debt just like it was a student loan, if you vote for me.”
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Power Grab
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This widely-publicized (and widely-promoted) phenomenon of kids playing hooky (that’s what they used to call it) reminds me of the drug and pot craze that they kept in the forefront of the culture when I was a kid. I never understood the attraction of it. Why get yourself polluted out of your mind when you should be on your toes and able to recognize when someone was trying to use or abuse you?
Back then, I don’t think they were necessarily trying to “reduce the surplus population”; I think they just wanted to reduce the competition. One reason I say that is because of what I saw happen to a former classmate of mine during our first year of college. I graduated a year early. I didn’t know it, but she did, too. But one day I was visiting the town where she was in college (a different town from where I was in college). I happened to stop in at a record store and saw her. I greeted her by name and waved at her. She turned my way with a dazed expression on her face. She did say “Hi…..” with a spaced-out tone. I had to assume she was under the influence of some kind of drugs.
Well, that was amazing to me. If she had stayed in high school, she probably would have been valedictorian. She was very accomplished , very popular, very attractive, etc. The whole package. I never heard what happened to her. She had so much going for her.
Since then, after learning about so-called “conspiracy theories” and seeing how plausible they could be, it made me wonder if someone wanted to take her out of the competition.
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