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


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