Thursday 17 October 2019

Puzzlement - when action seems to fly in the face of logic

I'm having a confusing morning this morning as I sit in bed listening to the news of the latest Climate Action protests. By now I hope it's nice and clear where I stand on the need for change, the need for us all to do whatever we can to make changes and improve the future. As part of that need I obviously support the right to protest, demonstrate and march, to create beautiful protests like the one Jackie Morris and other artists and writers, poets and performers are coming together and using to remind us why we need to change, what we are trying to protect and the right to point out as effectively as we can that companies, corporates, government and all the individuals that make up society need to make changes. And yet today's targets for the Extinction Rebellion protests seem incongruous with the messages we are all trying to send to folk who have yet to come on board for whatever reason. And, terrifyingly to me, judging by a lot of the reactions I'm hearing and reading on social media they have the potential to have the exact opposite effect to the one we need. To alienate not to persuade, to close people's ears, minds and hearts and destroy the good work of thousands of small local groups and individuals who work tirelessly in their communities to demonstrate the changes that people CAN do..

An efficient, clean, reliable mass transport system has to be the cornerstone to any country's response to cleaning up the air and environment as a whole. People need to be able to get around and the need to do it consistently and safely and know they are going to get where they need to be, when they need to be there and if, by shutting down the very networks that currently do that (more or less) then what are all those folk going to do? They are going to shift to personal transport - to cars and vans that they feel they have control over, to planes that will get them to that meeting in Scotland when they have to be back in London or Manchester or Newcastle that evening, to going backwards and point blank refusing to make any changes to their behaviour. I'm also puzzled when those same protesters start to damage infrastructure and destroy things - things that will then need to use finite resources to fix. I fear a backlash from the current actions and that, in my view, should worry us all...


1 comment:

  1. I am so glad to read your opinion and relieved I am not the only one to think this way. Some of the recent 'protest events' have felt to me like the wrong activity at the wrong time.
    Not just the element you write about (preventing someone getting to a job interview, or home for a child's birthday, or be able to visit a loved one in hospital) but actually doing it NOW.
    Whether we should Leave or Remain, how is the middle of the current mess we are in the right time to fully capture people's attention, to make them stop and think, to facilitate change?

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for stopping by and taking the time to comment, due to an upsurge in "odd" comments all comments are moderated. I hope it won't put too many of you off. I think I've also finally fixed the issue that meant we couldn't reply to comments
Tx