In her Oct. 3 column in the Post Independent, Christine Flowers draws parallels between 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg and then seven-year-old Elian Gonzalez who was at the center of a 2000 custody/immigration battle between Cuba and the United States. The situations involving the two children aren’t even vaguely similar.
The Gonzalez controversy was rife with politics; communism versus democracy. Some people can’t see climate change isn’t a political issue. It’s a scientific fact irrefutable by faith, intuition, or political bias. Yes, in this country, the two major parties are divided on the issue, but that’s only because Republicans can’t figure out how to make money on climate change.
Flowers implies Thunberg is being manipulated. By who? The Pope? The secretary general of the U.N.? Her father? By all accounts, Thunberg dove into the climate change issue on her own and she knows it backwards and forwards. Where’s the profit motive? These sailing trips she’s taking across the Atlantic are expensive.
Unlike what Flowers asserts, it’s appropriate the climate cause be led by youth. It’s their future that’s at stake and their elders are the ones who screwed up the world in the first place. The adults are the spoiled brats who refuse to give up their creature comforts to save the planet.
Fred Malo Jr.,
Carbondale
