The Climate Strike

Today, September 20, was a big deal in the environmental activism world. Millions of (mostly young) people around the world walked out of their schools and jobs to take part in a massive climate strike. This protest, inspired by the 16-year old Greta Thunberg, is designed to call action to the perils of climate change and precedes the UN Climate Action Summit, which will take place over the next few days. The main event in Granada, however, seemed to happen not during the school day but rather in the evening. That's the strike that I took part in. 

I've been to a lot of rallies, protests and marches over the past few years (particularly since 2016), but almost always in either Newport or Salem, and attending an event in a foreign European city was a new experience altogether. The protest, which was organized by Fridays for Future Granada, began on the University of Granada campus and slowly moved throughout the city, gaining participants along the way. The majority of the participants were university students and other young adults, which was a new experience for me. Whenever I attend an event in Newport I'm usually one of the youngest people there, and even in Salem it's hard to get a sizable number of Willamette students to go to a demonstration right across the street. 

In Granada, though, the youth clearly have the power. It was they who organized the march, who led the charges with their megaphones and who defied language barriers to bring all of the attending voices together. It was my first time being in an environment with a concentrated amount of Spanish youth (and other international students) and what I saw was inspirational. 

As you can imagine, participating in a protest in a foreign country also brings along some confusion. Signs were easy for me to understand for the most part (and I've started to pick up on word plays and puns, which is always fun), but the chants were a different story. It seemed like every time I had finally started to understand what the people around me were saying and could join in, the chant had died out and the group had moved onto another theme. 

"What are they saying?" my friends and I whispered to one another and the other English-speaking students around us. 

"I think they're saying 'Granada se va a quemar.' But maybe also 'necesitamos cambiar?'

For a while we just kind of mumbled along until we got to the words we understood (and then shouted those out), but by the end of the night it was pretty obvious what people were saying and we were able to join in. 

I also noticed some outstanding differences between this strike and movements that I've attended in the United States. For one, we stopped to kneel/sit about five times during the march. People at the front would start it, and the news would slowly travel to the back. Soon, everyone was sitting in the middle of the street, where we would cheer or slow-clap or chant to a call and response. The typical exchange went like this: 

"¿Que queremos?"

"¡Justicia climática!"

"¿Y cuando?"

"¡YA!" (everyone jumps to their feet)

Sitting in the street awaiting instructions

There was also a lot of...running? To be honest, I still don't understand this part. Maybe it was to make sure that we made it across a green light in time (although there were police officers blocking cars from entering the streets), or maybe it was just a way to show urgency. Either way, there would be times when everyone would just taking off running down the road, and we all had to grab onto our belongings and race to stay with the flow. The whole experience was full of these kinds of surprises. Are we sitting down? Are we standing up? Are we being quiet now so we can listen to the guy with the megaphone? Are we supposed to be running? What is happening?

The march ended in the Plaza de Isabel la Católica - fitting for a protest on the detrimental effects of a capitalist society to finish in a place dedicated to a woman who catalyzed the environmental and cultural destruction of the Americas when she sent Columbus on his journey. The young guy who had been leading the march invited any kids in the audience to come up front, and they took turns reading their demands out loud into the microphone. 

Reconvening in the plaza after the march

The whole experience was incredibly powerful, up there with the first Women's March and Pride parades that I attended. Unlike Pride, however, the major emotions that I felt during this protest were fear, rage and helplessness. It's easy to get wrapped up in the grandeur of the moment and cry happy tears for the hundreds of students who are shouting for the government to listen to them and start making changes that will save the planet. But when you really stop and think about what you're doing, everything gets a lot more sobering. When I worked in the Oregon State Capitol this year, I watched a climate change bill get ripped to shreds and eventually stall the entire government. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal (which wasn't even a bill but a resolution) was immediately targeted and destroyed by her enemies before it had a chance to make a case for itself. Donald Trump decided to the pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement nearly two years ago.  How are we ever going to save the planet from utter and total collapse when there are still people out there who can't admit to themselves that climate change is real?

Being a part of this protest also forced me to admit something to myself: I'm not doing enough. In fact, I'm barely doing anything. I've spent my life being "eco-friendly" and writing long-winded pieces about my feelings about climate change, but that doesn't do anything for the planet and the fight against climate change. I need to be more like my classmates, who spend their free time lobbying legislators and distributing information to the public. I need to be willing to be put myself on the line rather than waiting for someone else to do it for me. Being in Spain and seeing that my international peers are fighting the same fight as my peers in the United States - that helps me realize the magnitude of this problem. 

This is kind of a heavy post, but it's a heavy topic and unfortunately not one that we can pretend doesn't exist. You can go halfway across the world and still be on the same planet with the same greenhouse gases and melting ice caps, and no amount of fun cultural immersion or sightseeing will ever change that.