and waved eagerly. Greta disembarked with unflappable mien. She
was obviously a consequential world citizen. But she seemed
solemn as she viewed her surroundings, her feet now securely
planted on the ground and not on an undulating deck; was she a
knowingly weary Gandhi arriving in town after a long trip: with so
many sheep to tend and just one shepherd to lead them.
She was only 16 and had already nominated by three Swedish politicians for the Nobel Peace prize, although she ws not to be awarded the prize in 2019.
She had a mission; she was going to march for her cause. Did she know
that in the United States she walked in the footsteps of the
legendary who changed society, just like she wanted to? Maybe her
next marvel would be to write a letter from a Birmingham jail?
Whatever course Greta chooses, she’ll be on the right track; she has
a dream.
As Benjamin watched her on the dock in New York City, speaking
to her jubilant teen fans, he was unaware of how notable she was. He
was uninformed about her being the conscience of the climate
change crusade across the globe.
MORE:
On the dock, but still unsteady on her feet(she said),snappy in a
black nautical jacket, her military-style name printed over her breast
pocket, G. Thunberg; her hair dark brown and frizzy like a soft
sparrow that has just washed itself in a mirror clear bird bath, she
spoke softly and verbalized what her followers apparently wanted to
hear: this climate fight is across countries and continents. She was a
Colossus spanning the Earth.
Benjamin did not fully understand the significance of her words,
but in one sentence the youth of the world had become singular,
united, without nationalities. And in the best sense, Greta was
unknowingly, or slowly serenely glimpsing her global role, as a
queen bee now, populating the world with golden gathering pollen
workers, who were determined to keep this green planet
blossoming, to salvage the oceans, perfume the air again,
save the land from arid desolation, to avert the apocalyptic doom, a
threat as common these days as milk on cereal; the world’s children
were grossly encumbered by their vision of the world they would
eventually inherit, they felt like hostages, knotted and duct-taped,
by thugs of the worse temperament: the evil who steal the one
innocent, inviolate childhood. We who were preceding them were
stealing everything they had, their yesterdays, todays and
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
(it ) Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. -- SHAKESPEARE
But to these children, it does mean something, it signifies something
precious they are not willing to give up; yes, they are walking shadows
under the doom of a future oppressing sun, but not poor players. They
are
on the world stage now, and they strut and fret because the outcome as
it
stands now is so grim; they are not idiots by any means, they are in fact
the
brilliant sunshine that will replace the gloom of Climate Change if given
a
chance. They are rightly full of sound and fury that echoes down the
valley
of death at this time to the last syllable of recorded time. They are our
last
hope and they know it, even if we don’t. They will not be lighted fools
on a
way to dusty death. They will triumph, persevere, preserve this world
for their children who will not have to emerge from the shadows of their
mothers’ apron strings to win back a world that had been given away
like
so much confetti over a parade on its way to nowhere, and tragically to
a
hellish funeral of all life. .
She had somehow become the conscience of the Climate Change
crusade across the globe. As she walked the dock, she was no more
than a sprite, but crowd applauded her as if she were an Uncle Sam
on stilts. She easily towered over the potentates of the
General Assembly, as she damned them for their escalation of
Ineptitude about Climate Change.
She spoke pointedly. The audience clapped for her between
comments; unaware that she was condemning everyone sitting in
amphitheater, or listening with earphones, wrapping their heads like
a vise, waiting for a translation that was going to crush them to
hear.
She was in the business of knocking heads, if that what it took to get
her message heard.
“How dare you,” she reiterated caustically. Benjamin watched
stunned on his living room television. Thoughts were running
through his head. Was an unimpeachable phenom going down the
rabbit hole of impossible odds? Was she cautioning Atlas not to
shrug the world off his shoulders any longer? Ayn Rand, you high
priestess of apathy. Greta has come to town with a fountainhead of
mitigating vision for the world to witness. She was on a dais to the
downtrodden Millennials asking who was going to save the planet?
This child was achingly tormented: like writhing wildlife clenched
between the inhuman claws of a barbaric trap.
Greta launched into a tirade of tendentious vitriol about how life
as we have known it, will not be the life as she knows it. Benjamin
watched transfixed.
Her life was not going to end with an overheating whimper on her
watch. She was roaring from her premature burial with the last
gasps of breath she could muster.
The nefariousness of climate change had transfigured her; God
could have easily said of Greta, “With her I am well pleased.”
The paucity of a childhood; vanished dreams; impotent promises;
the cruel currency of capitalism; she was infuriated, with a white-hot
rage; crying helplessly like a burning cross(without a three-cornered
hood in sight) on a sacrosanct, suburban lawn of myopic, global
yawns: she had been gutted and betrayed like Christ and a prize
buck.
This child was an orphan in front of a blindly dying world. When
her elders turned to her for hope, she told them to go to hell, or wait
for the last vestiges of Earth to melt into the Stygian river.
Benjamin marveled at her outspoken, bitter, restrained
countenance, a face as twisted out of shape as Munch’s Scream.
Munch from Munchkin land: Oz had never had such terror as Greta
was explicating or Edvard had realized.
Her words were succinct, defiant, disdaining, a determined plea
for an antediluvian deliverance(would God dare do it again): a
simple treble gospel. But in her distraught misery she was
triumphant. Surely, her words were a clanging alarm clock, the size
of Cincinnati, heard around the world.
Benjamin thought to himself, what three other words were as
sacred, determined, irresolute. He knew in a moment what those
other three words were: “We the people.” How transfigured history
had become with the prophecy from that triptych of power,
perseverance, and staggering exultation.
There was hope in her beleaguered demand(the kind that could
crack a jubilant bell); just as there had been revolution in a nascent
nation with similar christening words. Three words helped found an
enduring, almost utopian heroism against oligarchies, tyranny and
corruption: the United States.
Would Greta’s words be as convincing, as electrifying, down the
corridors of time, across the continents and rising oceans: a new
heraldry for Homo Sapiens, and the inhabitants of its dominion? She
had traveled halfway around the world to utter her words in the land
of propitious freedom.
For a precociously enraged teenager, these were cerebral curse
Words, thought Benjamin. But profanity was not all she had in her
arsenal of partisan retribution.
She had held the world’s attention for more than 15 minutes, he
reasoned.
Everyone could see that she was a Joan of Arc of the airwaves.
She was telling the world that Gaia was in a death-grip and that
egregious negligence had caused it. She blamed the correct culprits;
and they were fatally, stone-cold frozen in her crosshairs. Her petite
eyes glared exceedingly beyond their normal size like high caliber,
smooth-bore rifle barrels.
These words, her emancipatory cry, would echo in history longer
than the world had time to survive the crisis that she was surgically
annunciating.
President Trump passed her in the hallways after her speech and
ignored her like a champion dunce. Her unchecked scowl could have
assassinated him.
That night, after his daughter Keats was asleep, Benjamin walked
downstairs to his office on the ground floor of their house with a cup
of tea in his hand, steam rising from it like a miniature brush fire. It
was 8 o’clock and he couldn’t risk a cup of coffee, or he might not
get any sleep. He would be up at 3 o’clock to give Keats a warm,
white bottle of milk. His wife, Clarinda, didn’t get up at night to feed
Keats because she couldn’t get back to sleep, afterwards. He could
climb back in bed and be asleep in minutes. So, he had the
nighttime duty of feeding Keats. Any other time, Clarinda
complained; he could sleep anywhere, at any time. He could fall
asleep at a red light.
He put the cup (which was brown and white and had
Hershey printed on it) down on his desk and slumped into his dark
blue swivel chair. Benjamin rifled chocolate as quickly as poultry
scarfed chicken feed. Probably more.
Facing the computer, he clicked his mouse and the black screen
saver disappeared. What replaced it on the laptop screen was a
detailed, high-resolution photograph of an ancient scroll, unrolled to
reveal the fine artistry of meticulously drawn Egyptian pictographs,
also known as hieroglyphics. The were painted in sunshine bright
colors across the body of the scroll like a stamp collection, each
hieroglyph representing a letter of that language’s alphabet.
Benjamin worked for United States Fidelity and Surety(USF&S), a
property and casualty company that had been in business since
1896.
With a click on the computer’s favorites icon, its cache of internet
addresses flashed into view, and Benjamin scrolled to the link for
the digital NYT that he subscribed to. He clicked on it and the NYT
front page appeared instantly.
Headlines and color photographs and lead stories filled the
computer screen like a quilt of a florid menagerie. Benjamin scanned
the electric text for a story about Greta’s speech, that day at the
U.N., on climate change, but he couldn’t find one.
Still looking at the front page on the computer screen, Benjamin
cautiously with peripheral vision lifted his mug of hot tea for a sip as
he considered what to do next. As he sipped, he noted to himself
that the tea was just the right warmth(the Goldilocks’ test), rich
with Earl Grey flavor and its liquid essence was velvety as brandy.
Benjamin was a connoisseur of quality wherever he could find it.
After some thought, he assumed that her eloquence would
appear, in a review, later that night or tomorrow morning. Without a
story about Greta to read, Benjamin typed climate change into the
search box at the top of the front page to see what other stories the
NYT had written recently about this topic
.
After he clicked on the search box, a long column of story
headlines became visible on the page, with brief descriptions of the
stories beneath them. A recent article that caught his
attention was from September 18, 2019, and it was titled: Climate
Change Is Not World War. It was written by Roy Scranton.
Where Benjamin was sitting, the room was lighted by solitary,
swan-neck lamp that bathed him in fluoresce like the moon on a
black night. Beyond the light, the room was in shadows like the
gaze of Edgar Allen Poe.
In the first sentence, the firebrand, Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez (AOC), was mentioned, and Benjamin knew of her from the
media, as the ludicrous purveyor of the Green New Deal (GND), with
Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who had not been
stigmatized with the same crown of thorns(yet). Benjamin was also
familiar with the GND. He had heard the merits and faults of the GND
debated nationwide for half a year now, since it was released to the
public. It was scorned by the right, the red states, as a manifesto
with the notoriousness of Mein Kampf, it seemed. The left praised it
and hallowed it as the newest book of the New Testament. . From
what Benjamin knew about its contents, and the urgency of its
messages, he guessed both sides were wrong.
With the acrimony between both sides, what truth could one hope
to decipher? Benjamin leaned closer to the computer screen to read
the article. Peering intently, as though he were Pasteur sighting for
the first time the germs that were infecting society, he read on,
calmly curious.
According to Roy Scranton, an English professor at Notre Dame, the
pamphleteers of the new, new deal pleaded for the patriotism that
America once knew during the annuals of the Greatest Generation.
In the text of the GND, the scribes had proposed that American
citizens revive “a new national, social, industrial and economic
mobilization on a scale not seen since World War Two and the New
Deal era.”
Benjamin thought to himself that maybe this was a lost cause
right out of the gate because wasn’t it only tempting to think you
could go home again. This was a new world born of the warriors of
WWII, as much because of them, as everyone else alive. If climate
change was true, didn’t we need a new, new call to arms; the newest
of cutting-edge paradigms.
TO BE CONTINUED.....
Shelby Featt:
I saw an ad for a Graduate Creative Writing Program at the NYU New
School for Fine Arts, yesterday.
Joshua Keenan:
Do you think that’s what you will do when you graduate?
Featt:
Not really. But it made me think about the situation we’re in with
Climate Change.
Keenan:
What do you mean?
Featt:
Suppose I wanted to be a writer. It’s two years until I graduate;
and then it will be probably be 10 years until I get published.
Keenan:
Everybody knows it takes time to carve out a career in writing.
Featt:
That’s twelve years. It’s eleven years until the tipping point with
Climate Change. And it doesn’t look like anyone is going to do
Something before then. So what’s the point? I’ll never have a
career and I’ll never grow old.
Keenan:
That’s one of the popular signs at the marches. You’ll die of old age
and I’ll die of Climate Change.
Featt:
The ad said: “Become the daring voices of a new generation.” Who
are they kidding? They haven’t looked at their thermometers lately.
There isn’t going to be a new generation; just the last generation.
Keenan:
So, if you’re going to be around, at least march, until then; write
your own sign to carry. There’s time enough for that.
Featt:
I wish it was funny. My Dad use to play an old song from the 60’s,
during Viet Nam. It was called Eve of Destruction. He’d play it over
and over again. I nearly memorized the lyrics. One of the lines
went: and marches alone won’t bring integration. Maybe marches
won’t add up to anything. Maybe it will take something else.
Keenan:
Like violence. You don’t think the civil rights laws were passed
before then.
Featt:
Maybe it always takes violence to get a stubborn point across.
Keenan:
Marches don’t mean anything. They just wear out your shoes,
sneakers. Marches are good for Nike.
Featt:
We don’t need a MFA to tell the truth to power.
Keenan:
Here’s what we can do. Write our epitaphs now and we’ll seem like
we’re dead already. And if the Earth fades into the sunset, it won’t
bother us. The Climate Change deniers have all the power and they
are going to keep it, because they have it, and they are not giving it
up for the short amount time they have left. But by then, it will be
too late for the rest of us.
MORE SOON
Novel SUICIDE CLUB 
& 
+ translations / Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers
