GRETA THUNBERG: Time Person of the Year // Nancy Jo Sales: Why is the president of the United States cyberbullying a 16-year-old girl?
Thunberg is 16 but looks 12. She usually
wears her light brown hair pulled into two braids, parted in the middle. She
has Asperger’s syndrome, which means she doesn’t operate on the same emotional
register as many of the people she meets. She dislikes crowds; ignores small
talk; and speaks in direct, uncomplicated sentences. She cannot be flattered or
distracted. She is not impressed by other people’s celebrity, nor does she seem
to have interest in her own growing fame. But these very qualities have helped
make her a global sensation. Where others smile to cut the tension, Thunberg is
withering. Where others speak the language of hope, Thunberg repeats the
unassailable science: Oceans will rise. Cities will flood. Millions of people
will suffer.
Greta Thunberg sits in silence in the cabin of the boat that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, there’s a cow skull hanging on the wall, a faded globe, a child’s yellow raincoat. Outside, it’s a tempest: rain pelts the boat, ice coats the decks, and the sea batters the vessel that will take this slight girl, her father and a few companions from Virginia to Portugal. For a moment, it’s as if Thunberg were the eye of a hurricane, a pool of resolve at the center of swirling chaos. In here, she speaks quietly. Out there, the entire natural world seems to amplify her small voice, screaming along with her. “We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow,” she says, tugging on the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt. “That is all we are saying.”
Greta Thunberg sits in silence in the cabin of the boat that will take her across the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, there’s a cow skull hanging on the wall, a faded globe, a child’s yellow raincoat. Outside, it’s a tempest: rain pelts the boat, ice coats the decks, and the sea batters the vessel that will take this slight girl, her father and a few companions from Virginia to Portugal. For a moment, it’s as if Thunberg were the eye of a hurricane, a pool of resolve at the center of swirling chaos. In here, she speaks quietly. Out there, the entire natural world seems to amplify her small voice, screaming along with her. “We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow,” she says, tugging on the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt. “That is all we are saying.”
It’s a simple truth,
delivered by a teenage girl in a fateful moment. The sailboat, La
Vagabonde, will shepherd Thunberg to the Port of Lisbon, and from
there she will travel to Madrid, where the United Nations is hosting this
year’s climate
conference. It is the last such summit before nations commit to new plans
to meet a major deadline set by the Paris Agreement. Unless they agree on
transformative action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s
temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution will hit the 1.5°C mark—an
eventuality that scientists warn will expose some 350 million additional people
to drought and push roughly 120 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.
For every fraction of a degree that temperatures increase, these problems will
worsen.
This is not fearmongering; this is science. For decades, researchers
and activists have struggled to get world leaders to take the climate threat
seriously. But this year, an unlikely teenager somehow got the world’s
attention....
The morning after
election day 2016, I got a call from a girls’ school in New York where I was
scheduled to speak. “We have to reschedule,” said a representative from the
school. “The girls are too upset.” Girls across the
country were upset when Trump was elected, but not simply on partisan grounds.
They were upset because Donald Trump was
a bully, a cyberbully, and he bullied girls and young women like them – women
like the former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, who revealed that, when she was
19, he called her “Miss Piggy,” a dig at her weight.
In a New
York Times poll in the run-up to the election, nearly half of girls
aged 14 to 17 said that Trump’s comments about women affected the way they
think about their bodies. Only 15% of girls said they would vote for him if
they could. And now Trump has a
new target for his bullying: Greta Thunberg,
the 16-year-old environmental activist. Thunberg seems to be really making
Trump upset, without meaning to. She doesn’t fit into any of his ideas of how
girls are supposed to act. She isn’t trying to be a contestant in one of his
beauty pageants. She’s too busy trying to get world leaders like him to do
something about the climate crisis. She’s too occupied by giving speeches at
places like the UN – where Trump was laughed at, when he gave a speech in 2018,
and Thunberg was met with respect, despite slamming the entire body for
“misleading” the public with inadequate emission-reduction pledges...
