Flashback: Video Shows Terrified Child Freak Out After School Fills His Head with Environmentalist Propaganda
The use of young people as part of any sort of debate is one of the more tiring aspects of the modern culture wars, at least as far as I’m concerned.
Greta Thunberg is the current poster child (literally) for the climate change movement.
The 16-year-old Swedish activist has called for climate strikes by young people across the planet in which they take time out of class to demand action on the environment.
This is the kind of thing that may get West Beverly High to reconsider whether Donna Martin can graduate with her class, but in terms of wider cultural or environmental change, I remain skeptical.
Thunberg recently crossed the Atlantic on a zero-emissions boat since she doesn’t fly; this was even more of a stunt than it appeared on its face, as the operators of the boat had to send a replacement crew across the ocean on a plane due to how hastily the trip was arranged.
However, we weren’t supposed to treat it as such. Thunberg’s arrival in New York City was basically treated as if the QE2 had just come into port for the first time.
Furthermore, we were all expected to hold back on criticism of Thunberg. After all, she’s just a kid, right?
Whenever I hear this argument, I’m reminded of one of the youngest environmental warriors there was — a child who went viral due to a breakdown caused by a bit too much propaganda at school.
You may not remember the name Henry Marr. You may remember his viral video clip, however:
Back in 2016, as ABC News reported, the then-6-year-old was filmed talking to his mom after seeing a documentary on the environment at school. He was obviously shaken.
“The planet is going to be wrecked,” Henry said. “People are just being rude to it.”
The rudeness included cutting down trees to make roads (as opposed to the old days when they would just pave paradise and put up a parking lot), throwing trash on the ground and having animals eat said trash
“They need to think about what they are doing and what they are doing to the planet,” Marr said.
“I wish I was an adult right now,” he said through the tears. “I just want to do my job, right now.”
“You don’t have to be an adult,” his mom, Allie Hall, said. “What can you do as a kid to help them?”
What he ended up doing was starting a Facebook page called Henry the Emotional Environmentalist, which is a start, I suppose.
So why did Henry’s mom post the video in the first place?
“I had picked him up from school and he was on this mission to teach me about the earth,” Hall told ABC. “He was like mom, ‘Did you know that this was happening to the animals and people are littering?’ He kept getting more and more worked up about it.”
Except this wasn’t something to get so worked up about.
Most of the things he talked about aren’t actually major issues.
So animals eat trash. Many of them are happy to, as raccoons would no doubt attest to if they could talk.
As for deforestation, we might actually be seeing an opposite trend nowadays.
But perhaps most importantly, none of this is worth making a child cry over. It’s also not worth posting a video of your own child crying on social media and making him go viral.
“It’s a bigger issue than I had even realized,” Allie Hall said. “Just seeing a little kid getting upset about how the world will get worse by the time he’s older is pretty upsetting.”
What’s upsetting is that heavy stuff like this is being dumped on 6-year-olds, most of whom can’t do a whole lot. What they can do could probably be taught without sending them into an emotional spiral like this.
Good stewardship doesn’t require showing a documentary about the horrors of human behavior.
Simply tell them to throw their trash away. If you want to teach them about maintaining our forests, how about telling them to plant a tree?
Furthermore, using this kid to score points is beyond unacceptable. He was essentially turned into a social media celebrity for environmentalist causes.
Look at this poor kid crying. Don’t you feel bad, adults?
We’re supposed to take this very seriously, but don’t you dare criticize the message because he’s only 6. It’s like Greta Thunberg taken to an absurd extreme.
And that, unfortunately, is what some people want.
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