About Fridays For Future’s First Anniversary
On Monday, August 20th, 2018, a 15-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg decided not to go to school to protest against her government’s inaction about the Climate Crisis. She held a 3-week long School Strike until the general elections.
On the first days, she was alone. She wasn’t actually famous at that time. But today, the entire world knows her face and fight, and by the time I’m writing this text, she is on a small racing sailing boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on her way to New York to speak in front of the UN Climate Summit on September 23.
After she was joined by other students in her continuous strike in August 2018, after with the election was over, they decided to have a much more durable strike by leaving school every Friday to sit in front of their country’s Parliament, and to do so until their country would finally commit to follow the Paris Agreements and cut down GHG emissions to save the future. That was their plan.
Oh, and also, that gave a name to their action, which is now known worldwide: Fridays For Future.
I guess almost everyone reading this post would already know this story, because it has grown really fast and now, the Movement is leading in the fight to save our planet. I therefore don’t really need to write the entire story here, it’s not the point.
What I wanted, as we are today exactly one year away from Greta first sitting in Stockholm with her « Skolstrekj för klimatet » sign, is just to pay a small tribute to this incredible movement, these incredible young (and less young) people who are part of it, and the incredible time I am given the opportunity to live with this movement.
I am not among the most active strikers of Fridays For Future. I am not among the most known either (and I don’t especially want it, just to be clear). But I’m definitely part of it and I am very very proud of that.
I was not even among the first to join Greta (in fact, I only heard about her after her speech at the COP24 in December, and more after when she went by train all the way to the Davos Economic Forum in January 2019. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I believe I joined Fridays For Future sometime between mid-January and early February. I have then started to help as I could, being admin of the FFF Europe account on Twitter since late February if I remember well.
With a few friends, we have also around that time started a local group in my nearest « big » city, being one of the first local group of Youth For Climate France to be launched. Back in these days, the movement was already strong in Germany, Belgium, Australia and other countries, but it was only the beginning in France (except for Robin from Grenoble, who had already followed Greta earlier ;) ).
For my entire life, I have hoped to one day find other boys and girls from my age also fighting to save the world. You can’t imagine what it is to spend more than 15 years wanting so hard to find other people with the same interests than you, while seeing than all around, people only want to spend time playing video games, watching TV or going to parties. Really hard. So imagine, almost from one day to the next one, discover than you are finally not alone, but than nearly everywhere in the world, you can find a local group full of other people fighting with you. Imagine that. You get my level of happiness that day.
Some say we are heroes, some say we are only kids telling adults what to do. I don’t care of what people say about us. We are young people fighting for our future. Maybe we won’t get anything. But never, never I want to have to leave FFF. That’s now my family. A family of more than 2 million people, all around the world.
It may take me my free time, it may make me miss school a few days, but it makes me happy to be part of it.
So to all members of the Fridays For Future movement all around the globe, Happy Birthday.
And to all of them, my sisters and brothers strikers, to all the amazing people I discovered these last months, the ones I met in real life and the others I will maybe never see even if I spend hours organizing stuffs with them, and of course to Greta who made this possible, thank you.
If you think you’re alone, if you think you’re too small, think about her. One year ago, she was alone. Now we are millions.
Clement
