Greta Thunberg's 495-word UN speech points us to a future of hope – or despair
Will you recognise the
necessity of the enormous task which must start now, or will you say nothing,
do nothing?
Greta Thunberg’s
address to the UN’s Climate Action Summit on Monday may well prove to be the
climate change movement’s Gettysburg Address. Like Abraham Lincoln’s revered
speech, which ran to 273 words, Thunberg’s was also very short, only 495 words
long. Lincoln famously spoke
at the dedication of the Gettysburg Cemetery, following the leading orator of
the day, Edward Everett, who took two hours to deliver the official address, a
13,000 word oration. Lincoln’s speech, simply described in the day’s official
program as Dedicatory Remarks, lasted less than three minutes.
Thunberg would
similarly have had some good acts to follow at a UN talk-fest, but her presence
would not, at first glance, seem to be of the same significance as those of the
various world leaders who had gathered for the event. And yet it is
Thunberg’s speech, which took just four-and-a-half minutes to deliver, which,
one suspects, will resonate long into the future. In the manner that was
then traditional, Everett’s marathon speech, deemed very good by the standards
of the day, was rich with classical allusion. But Lincoln used no classical
reference. Instead, in a way that it is hard to appreciate from this distance
of time, he was profoundly modern, using Biblical phrasing and rhythms that
appealed to a population for whom the Book was the word, not Sophocles.
Thunberg’s speech was
similarly phrased in the contemporary argot pitched to the polarising force of
social media’s algorithms, suffused with a contained rage. For she came not
with a dream, but a nightmare, the scientific truth of climate change
succinctly put in five paragraphs. Her dreams, she said, had been stolen from
her along with her childhood.
Thunberg’s
speech was damned by many, a Fox News commentator responding to the speech by
calling Thunberg “a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents
and by the international left”. (See her response). So too Lincoln, the London Times in
1863 not so very distant from Fox News in 2019, when, echoing some US
newspapers, opined : “The ceremony [at Gettysburg] was rendered ludicrous by
some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”... listen to her speech, and read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/26/greta-thunbergs-495-word-un-speech-points-us-to-a-future-of-hope-or-despair
