THE COLUMN: First Time Tragedy, Second Time Farce

Girl-children and their Pied Pipers took to the streets of Manhattan over the weekend, demanding -- demanding! -- an end to all traditional sources of energy and the immediate installation of the net-zero, carbon-free, powered-by-unicorn-farts utopian future they believe they're owed because, well, just because. The "March to End Fossil Fuels" was an orchestrated kickoff to "Climate Week" convened to Save the Planet and featured appearances by the usual suspects, including la Pasionaria herself, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well notable lefty actors such as Susan Sarandon, Kyra Sedgewick, Ethan Hawke, Edward Norton, and Kevin Bacon, who all have time on their hands since they're on strike from play-acting in films. (Full disclosure: so are the writers, which includes me.) According to the entirely one-sided story by Seth Borenstein of the AP:

“We have people all across the world in the streets, showing up, demanding a cessation of what is killing us,” Ocasio-Cortez told a cheering crowd. “We have to send a message that some of us are going to be living on, on this planet 30, 40, 50 years from now. And we will not take no for an answer.”

This protest was far more focused on fossil fuels and the industry than previous marches. Sunday’s rally attracted a large chunk, 15%, of first-time protesters and was overwhelmingly female, said American University sociologist Dana Fisher, who studies environmental movements and was surveying march participants.

Of the people Fisher talked to, 86% had experienced extreme heat recently, 21% floods and 18% severe drought, she said. They mostly reported feeling sad and angry... Among the marchers was 8-year-old Athena Wilson from Boca Raton, Florida. She and her mother Maleah, flew from Florida for Sunday’s protest. “Because we care about our planet,” Athena said. “I really want the Earth to feel better.”

And then what?

In other words, the usual hysteria from people born yesterday and easily emotionally manipulated, who are convinced The End is Near but somehow the boo-boo will be made all better if only we cast off the technology that has made the lives of the population of the earth immeasurably better, eradicated many of the ills that long plagued human existence, and allowed these pampered, gullible babies to indulge their pique without fear of consequences. It's the old pathetic fallacy, now being applied to Mother Earth instead of cuddly, stinky animals.

Ho-hum. To us veteran Boomers, who have watched the children of the Left marching, singing, sloganeering, protesting, advocating, whining, whinging, stamping, stomping, shrieking, and generally carrying on like spoiled two-year-olds raised by Marxist nannies for more than half a century, there's nothing new under the sun. Back in the Sixties when this sort of European-style political demonstration was new, the whole thing ended in tragedy at Kent State in May of 1970, when the flower children learned the hard way that you shouldn't throw rocks at guys with guns. Today, the truth of Marx's dictum -- history repeats, first time as tragedy, second time as farce -- continues in the impotent tantrums of those who would Just Stop Oil.

Aye, there's the farce.

Alas, some grownups have refused to spank their children and in fact facilitate their mental and emotional breakdowns by indulging them. This week is "Climate Week," which coincides with the opening of the increasingly fascistic U.N. -- what was once an international organization run by the victorious World War II powers has now degenerated into a Third World grievance fest -- during which the world's Makers will again be browbeaten by the far more numerous Takers. Having first posited a counter-factual (the existence of "climate change"), they have proceeded to act on it as if it were real, offering all sorts of crackpot and cockamamie "solutions" that include a regression to sunshine and windmills, but pointedly do not include nuclear power, which gives their Luddite game away: they are opposed to anything that actually works and in favor of archaic and inadequate tech that history has long passed by. They are, in short, opposed to anything that makes your life easier and in favor of anything that makes you suffer.

Throughout history there have been plenty of millenarian doomsday cults focusing on the imminent end of the world. Usually, they are religiously inspired nuts scouring the Bible for clues to the Last Days. The current crop of se crackpots, however, are malicious, a Childrens' Crusade of regression meted out as punishment for Western cultural and scientific success. In other words, they are the weaponized jealousy of the world's losers, egged on by a cabal of the super wealthy who stand to profit mightily from the demolition of the old order as they usher in a New World Order from their Bond-villain lairs in Davos, Geneva, and London -- which goal is, by the way, a total right-wing conspiracy theory, even though American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George H.W. Bush have invoked the phrase publicly, the Trilateral Commission touts it, and the Atlantic Council advocates it.

It is rich, to say the least, that the heir to the British throne, William -- a real chip off the old blockhead -- is leading the charge as the founder of something called the Earthshot Prize, "designed to find and grow the solutions that will repair and grow our planet this decade." Quoth he:

The Earth is at a tipping point and we face a stark choice: either we continue as we are and irreparably damage our planet, or we remember our unique power as human beings and our continual ability to lead, innovate and problem-solve. People can achieve great things. The next ten years present us with one of our greatest tests – a decade of action to repair the Earth.

To complete the transition from tragedy to clown show, this week's protests are in part aimed at... wait for it... Joe Biden, who protesters say hasn't done enough to stop "climate change" and its concomitant "global emergency" before it kills us  all. At yesterday's demonstrations in New York City, "they aimed their wrath directly at U.S. President Joe Biden, urging him to stop approving new oil and gas projects, phase out current ones and declare a climate emergency with larger executive powers."

“We hold the power of the people, the power you need to win this election,” said 17-year-old Emma Buretta of Brooklyn of the youth protest group Fridays for Future. “If you want to win in 2024, if you do not want the blood of my generation to be on your hands, end fossil fuels.”

So far, however, the climate alarmists and the apocalypticists are batting zero:

It's small comfort that this, too, shall pass. Astroturfed movements like the "climate emergency" can only thrive in a world where nothing else seriously threatens. Still, never underestimate the Left's appetite for victimhood, even if they have to invent an imaginary threat in order to feel the moral superiority that, in their world, comes with being prey instead of a predator. The boys who cried wolf have been at this for decades now, and their increasingly impatient desperation is a sign that they know the jig will soon be up. Gas and oil will not disappear; the internal-combustion engine will not be replaced by electric cars; space exploration will not be conducted via cavorite. But they'll find something else, equally fanciful, to complain about.