"I noticed that a lot of people care."
When I first heard about last Friday’s climate strike, I decided to bring my kid. He’s a passionate boy in general - and climate issues really get him riled up. It will be a transformative experience for him, I thought. He’ll get to see other young people showing up and speaking out. He’ll become an activist, I thought. We’ll bond.
I bought poster board the night before, and in the morning, we made a sign. Well, mostly I made the sign while he read a comic and changed his mind a few times about what the sign should say.
My husband decided to come. We checked Q out of school and hopped on the train. I’d forgotten to bring a t-shirt for him to change into, and it was getting hot. We got down to City Hall Plaza and he was too shy to hold the sign up high.
The rally lasted forever. The sun on the treeless brick plaza got hotter, a blazing reminder of why we were there. My son got hungry and cranky and laid down on the bricks to rest. He fell asleep.
Around him, children of all ages assembled. Adults, too. Signs - artful, crass, funny, angry, sad, desperate, logical - were everywhere. Q’s friends fanned him with theirs. As soon as the march started, he and my husband peeled off to get a lemonade. I didn’t see them again until dinnertime.
And that was that. My vision for the day looked almost nothing like how the day turned out. It’s what democracy looks like sometimes, I guess - uncomfortable, messy, open-ended.
When we reconnected later at home, I asked him what he’d seen or noticed that had stuck with him. “I noticed that a lot of people care,” he said. “Yeah, they do,” I said. I showed him images from people in Turkey, India, Paris, Berlin, Seattle, New York, Afghanistan, Ireland, Pakistan, Melbourne, Uganda - who were all out doing the same thing. He thought that was pretty cool.
It was a reminder of two habits to continue practicing. One is releasing my expectations about outcomes. The other is to keep doing things (thank you Joy Wilson for this aphorism to live by) regardless of the outcome. I might never find out if a seed was planted when my boy noticed that millions of people care about the planet, just like him. But getting out there anyway is what pushes us forward.
Talk to you soon,
Leigh
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