the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

But she's not just a girl with Asperger's. She's a Swedish girl with Asperger's.

In lots of ways, we quite like the Swedes. We like their noir novels and their flat-pack furniture. Their ABBA, their Lykke Li. Their cosy cocoa-and-cake culture. And we often find appeal in much of their public policy. Appeal right up until the point where we have to ponder paying for it. Then, abruptly, Sweden is slammed as a socialist dystopia.

When a girl from Sweden tells the world all the ways that they are failing the planet, all the toil we're neglecting to do for the earth, she's dismissed as a meddler.

She's a person — and not just a person, but a mere girl — who's looking down at us, who's judging us.

If we can work out ways to disregard her — to use her age and accent and Asperger's against her — then her scowling and judgment doesn't matter. In considering the source as less than, we can rationalise not paying proper attention. After all, the judgment of our inferiors matters little.

But she's not just a girl, with Asperger's, who's Swedish. For the kicker, she's a girl, with Asperger's, who's Swedish and who's asking us to do more than just separate our rubbish. And this is what it's really about. The pigtails and soft voice takes a backseat to the true problem with Greta Thunberg: she reminds us of the litany of our collective failings.

Not just about how we don't care enough, but that we're not doing enough. That we're not outspoken enough. That we're not sacrificing.
That even if we acknowledge that there's a climate calamity, we're not forgoing anything for it.

Just as we hate vegans because they remind us that there's a dark cost — paid by animals every bit as sentient as our fawned-over puppies — to that burger, Greta is the ghost of a very dismal Christmas future.

It's equal parts predictable and reprehensible that a girl gets targeted because she's saying and doing what we're too — variously — lazy, complacent and greedy to do ourselves.

But the reasons she bristles, the reasons that a soft-spoken 16-year-old Swede has the capacity to stir such defensiveness and prompt such venom, is testimony to the fact that she's doing an awful lot right.

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