Jonathan Wexler - Greta Forever: A Global Environmentalist Visits Montreal

The title pretty much says it all.

In the midst of Gretas climate marches which took place on Friday September 24th, 2021, I found out who is really trying to take advantage of Greta Thunberg.

Using the Twitter handle @globalteachin, a group of people in Stockholm are attempting to teach Marxism to Gretas followers.

I know this because I requested reading material and someone from Stockholm sent me these very simplified Marxist texts.

Hello: does anyone remember the Soviet Union? And its collapse.

Marxism is the G-d that failed: just look at whats going on in Cuba, and I know, Ive been there 3 times including a long stint staying outside Havana.

There is no ideology that can fix whats going on concerning our climate, biodiversity loss, pollution, etc.

It takes real innovation and not the kind that Bill Gates propagandizes which will only line his pockets even more. Since he swindled IBM with his DOS (disk operating system) and took sexual advantage of both his employees at Microsoft and women under his power in his foundation: he is not to be trusted.

It will take embracing Ubuntu as the only true global operating system: quick, download it and install it from:

https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

For United Global People, and Yemi Babington-Ashaye, who know much more of whats going on around the world from his home base in Geneva, than whatever is going on in Stockholm.

This is where Gretas story gets complicated.

Read on mes amis

I realized then and there this is the demarcation line between the past and the future. It wasnt just the pandemic or the possible ecological collapse or technological hyper-oligopoly, but it was all those things and more: not the least of which has to do with Greta Thunberg and my estranged daughter outside New York City who I have only seen once when she was a newborn.

I had survived mine-infested beaches, total mental breakdown, cancer, homelessness, only to find myself in my mid-forties at the very precipice of world civilization where every breath began to count.

I think it was that month I spent downtown of my birthplace and home Montral holed up in a polar vortex winter at a hotel working for Extinction Rebellions London home-base reading David Wallace-Wells The Uninhabitable Earth and Shoshana Zuboffs Surveillance Capitalism that turned me on to the turn around, about a year before the outbreak of pandemic which perhaps proves them both right.

You see, for a very long time I thought I was the one with the problem, perhaps something like what happened to Greta Thunberg when she first started to struggle with the symptoms of Aspergers, and it took perhaps until that freezing winter month of contemplating environmental calamity and potential extinction along with the increasing control of information wielded by tech monopolies that furthered an older line of thought I had since I wrote a play and novel in high school about unsettling issues I saw in society that it was not me, but the world that was the problem.

Seems like a more prescient line of thought everyday now.

As things quicken, it becomes ever harder to think clearly and critically as we are bombarded with computer-mediated propaganda on all sides. I realize the very act of writing now, anything at all, and especially anything on the internet, subjects you to reams of haters almost no matter what.

Narrowcasting your messaging, turning off comments, password protecting content, nothing will effectively protect you from the scrutiny, not even Reporters Without Borders.

I am struck though by so many things that are screaming out for questioning, exactly as Greta does on environmental issues:

• Do we have the right leadership?
• Is our economic system fair?
• What are we doing about increasingly sophisticated weaponry?
• Are we accurately gauging the progress, we are, or are not, making as a civilization?
• Are we beginning to treat longstanding injustices such as racism with the urgency they deserve?
• Are we adequately protecting our real journalists and others who seek hard truths in light of obscurantist powers?

There are a multitude of other questions to be asked as I go into further detail below about how many questions will land you in lots of trouble, as they have me, but perhaps I will be able to clear the air a bit through this text to whats on my mind.

As I expand upon below, I have no special credentials, besides knowing a bit about software development after twenty years of being a technical writer, and reading perhaps a couple of thousand books on a wide scope of knowledge, but I also perhaps think that my motivations are at least an attempt to be genuine, in exposing a lot of the hypocrisy, especially around issues of the climate crisis and technological monopolization which it is my argument go hand-in-hand, to somehow attempt at the better world Greta cries out for and I only wish for my own daughter.

Well it was not exactly Woodstock but may as well have been with an actual higher attendance, 500k compared to 400k. And to me the more staggering stat was that there were more than a quarter of all Montralais out for the Fridays For Future Montral edition where Greta Thunberg, after having crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat since she doesnt fly on pollutant jetliners, or travel on much else but trains and electric cars, made it to the march after spending time the week before in New York for meetings at the UN.

And I was in the middle of it.

This was mere months after my internal revelations in that harsh wintery February hotel room planning activist actions and contemplating societal change and here was the action to trump all actions, and it was elating.

I would never get to see Greta that day, the crowd was too thick at the end of the march to wait around in the hot sun the couple of hours until she spoke so I ducked into a local watering hole to bide my time after which I would try to catch the conclusion.

All I managed to see after was actually a fitting bookend, members of the local branch of Extinction Rebellion carrying a coffin emblazoned with Notre Futur, our future on it.

Having sadly missed the environmental activist who would come to drive a lot of my subsequent motivation, I nonetheless imbibed enough of the fumes of the march to perhaps get on the other side of this demarcation line where my life, maybe all lives, were to be caught up in the rest of the grand events of the 21st century in lots of ways defining the next steps of how life will unfold on this planet.

I am just a lowly technical writer who has faced some rather challenging periods so how, the thought has occurred to me since, can I really be apart of this?

I had rejected Extinction Rebellions tactics, specifically one of their chief strategies of getting arrested, and have never been comfortable with extremes of the left or right, so how was I to proceed past a mundane life to a life with the same resoluteness, while maintaining my humbleness, of a Greta Thunberg?

And not a year later these choices would come into much starker relief as the whole world would be struck by a sort of preemptive crisis to the perhaps main attraction of global heating: the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.