John Kerry on activism - and the need to fight climate change
I can’t tell you the exact moment I realized how many powerful people belonging to the previous generation were failing ours, but I will never forget the feeling. It animates me still today. It was the feeling of coming home from a war knowing politicians were mouthing words about a conflict that looked completely different from the one they’d sent us to fight, only to read the leaked Pentagon Papers and learn so many were saying one thing publicly while privately knowing another. It made me angry. But more importantly, it made me an activist.
Five decades ago, I spent two years of my life working with other young veterans to end a war that had gone wrong. We were attacked. We were criticized. We were spied on. We were even arrested. But it was worth it; a democracy relies on free speech, but it relies even more on the speech being truthful. It is the truth after all that sets us free. Speaking the hard truth is never free, but the price it comes with is one each generation must pay to right a wrong.
Today’s younger generation is speaking their truth about climate change, and it feels familiar. In 1971, Richard Nixon sat in the darkness of the Oval Office stewing about me, slandering me, spending a U.S. President’s precious time attacking a 27-year-old naval officer. The tapes weren’t revealed for decades. Give Donald Trump credit for one thing only: his temper tantrums are all on Twitter. Imagine a man in his 70s insulting a young woman for daring to speak science to power. How topsy-turvy the world must look to a 17-year-old Greta Thunberg that she, and not the leader of the free world, is held to a standard of maturity and adulthood that Trump has never felt bound by.
<snip - speaking of how the levers of power are not controlled by the young>
We must bring together the younger generation, with its moral clarity, and the older generation, which controls many of the levers of power. It’s why I am building World War Zero, a coalition of people of all walks of life joining together to respond to this great challenge of our time, much in the same way we mobilized to respond to World War II. We want to unite the passion and energy of the young activists with the change–making power of policymakers, diplomats, CEOs, military and civic leaders.
https://news.yahoo.com/john-kerry-unjust-war-vietnam-154036694.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
He would have been a great president. His last interview on Lawrence O'Donnell was epic.
