What’s more pathetic than a grown adult man attacking a teenage girl for caring about the planet? Yeah, not much. Can’t think of anything to be honest.
After Greta Thunberg’s passionate, spot-on and widely applauded speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, an uncomfortable number of high-profile Australian men have criticised her in the media and on the internet.
They’ve called her an “annoying little brat,” “Greta Whingeberg” and “needlessly anxious.”
They’ve accused her of being stage-managed by her parents, questioned her qualifications for talking about the climate crisis and told her to calm down.
These men are not well-researched climate scientists; one is a former breakfast TV-host who turned up drunk to work after the Logies, another is a former footballer who is best known for his racist tweets, and then there’s the politician who once filmed himself dressed in a leotard impersonating Beyoncé dancing to ‘Single Ladies’.
When Thunberg calls for action to address the climate crisis and says, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing,” these men say, “You’re overreacting. Please be quiet while we watch the world burn. You’re disrupting the view.”
These men are the same men who scoffed at last week’s climate strike where hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets to fight for a fossil-fuel-free future.
These men are the same men who shared that ridiculous Facebook post telling millennials to stop protesting and start riding their bikes to school to fix the climate crisis.
These men need to stop talking.
The fact that we have to defend a 16-year-old girl from the fragile egos of grown adult men is disgraceful.
But we’ll do it anyway because Thunberg deserves to have a voice and be heard.
And we’re not alone, the internet has come out in force to support Thunberg and drown out the whingeing voices of the grown adult men annoyed at a teenage girl for speaking the truth.
“You’re a sad excuse of a man picking on a 16-year-old girl with Aspergers, all because she and millions of her peers care about the future of our planet,” one person commented.
“A 73-year-old man having a tantrum and peeing his pants in a public forum is weird,” wrote another.
And then: “Tell us how science works please, you dirt-dumb, racist old ruckman.”
Enough is enough. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, privileged old white men need to stop attacking Greta Thunberg.
In her own words, “How dare you?”
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