Two people who care. Photo / AP
OPINION:
Because this is a column about what's been trending on the internet this week, I was gearing up to talk about salad dressing, negroni sbagliato, or rude celebrities and their weird omelette choices. Instead, I am going to talk about sunflowers.
Last week, two Just Stop Oil activists threw a tin of tomato soup at the famous Van Gogh painting and, immediately, people were outraged. How dare they destroy something so precious?
My initial reaction to the news and the video that circulated online was the same as so many people. What the hell were they thinking? And what did they expect to achieve with this silly little stunt of theirs?
Then I got over myself, thought about it a little bit longer, and realised that society had conditioned me to react that way, and that, to my embarrassment, the activists had achieved their goal: they made me realise the utter ridiculousness of my reaction to the potential destruction of a painting of sunflowers more than I care about the very real and ongoing destruction of the planet and the fact that, unless we act now, soon we will have no actual sunflowers at all.
To make matters even worse, my initial outrage was completely misplaced, as the painting wasn't even damaged at all (it was behind a sheet of glass and they knew it).
This simple act of non-violent protest by two young people has made headlines worldwide for days now and it has made a bunch of us look like fools who care more about a painting than we care about the future of life on planet Earth.
listen to her explain the Van Gogh soup protest.
— michael mezz (@michaelmezz) October 18, 2022
she’s got a point, no? pic.twitter.com/cObcWNx8aP
You know that's not true about yourself, right? You know that, deep down, you care about life on Earth more than you care about Van Gogh's sunflowers. Why have we been led to act like we don't? If we're going to be perfectly honest, some of it is possibly the uncomfortable reality and the fear that, if we admit we are worried about human survival, we will have to change the way we live now. That we have built ourselves a comfortable life at the expense of the lives of others, and at the expense of the future of life on Earth, in general.
These activists care about this. If you think they want to be popular, that's your mistake. They're not trying to be popular, they are trying to warn us of the emergency we face and yet choose to ignore.
We ignore it every single day. Stories about climate change barely get a mention anywhere. If you tweet or share this article somehow, it'll get no likes or shares. They have been conditioned not to care, to the point of not even realising they are not caring.
In an interview with Owen Jones, a member of Just Stop Oil said all the protesters did was offend some sensibilities and that our sensibilities need to be offended. She's right.
Everyone on the internet calling them attention-seekers is right. They want attention - attention to the fact that life on Earth, as we know it, will soon be an impossibility. That at the rate we are going, we will run out of drinking water within my child's lifetime. That the catastrophes we have been witnessing around the world are not just "weather events" but the very real reality of the climate catastrophe we are living through.
Meanwhile, we shout about a painting, as the world around us literally burns.
If you disagree with what they are fighting for, then you really ought to ask yourself why you don't care about the future of the planet. If you agree with their message but disagree with the way they choose to convey it, you ought to ask what sort of method do you think would work. Quietly protesting with some posters outside Parliament doesn't work. Marching down the street does not seem to have done it for us either. Thousands upon thousands of young children striking for the climate every week barely gets us to bat an eyelid. So, if not a tin of tomato soup at a famous painting, what then?
What will get us to care?
It is a bleak time to be a young human on Earth. It is a bleak time to be raising small humans too. Around the world, instead of taking actual meaningful action to avoid climate catastrophe, governments are introducing new anti-protest laws. When you slam the people fighting for life on Earth, pay attention to who you are actually supporting instead.
You can question their methods all you want but, at the end of the day, at least these people care. For that, we should be grateful.