“I thought this site was supposed to be free of politics,” the email read. “Greta Thunberg is a primary school drop out with serious psychological problems. Good choice for your inspiration for some contrived crisis devised to destroy the free market system.”
This was the only negative response I received in response to an appeal authored by Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, Uganda’s Vanessa Nakate, Poland’s Dominika Lasota, and the Philippine’s Mitzi Tan. These four young women were simply asking us to add our names to their emergency appeal to world leaders for climate action at the COP26 conference that ended yesterday in Glasgow. Their appeal was to finally face up to our intensifying climate crisis.
I added my name to their appeal and forwarded their request to my various email lists. I received a ton of enthusiastic responses and agreements to sign the appeal. The claims made by my unhappy respondent are not supported by reality.
Let’s look at these three claims: Greta as a “primary school dropout,” her “serious psychological problems,” and the “contrived crisis devised to destroy the free market system.”
Bloomberg News reported that Thunberg had graduated from secondary education with 14 A’s and three B’s. While these are solid grades for anyone, let alone a student missing school to protest in front of Swedish Parliament, Thunberg told the Swedish newspaper DagensNyheter that she likely would have pulled off straight A’s had it not been for her weekly climate strikes.
Thunberg has also used her platform to be philanthropic. She won the first Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity and donated a portion of the $1.14 million prize to fighting coronavirus in the Brazilian Amazon. She also donated $100,000 from another prize received from Human Act, to the United Nations Children’s Fund, to help children impacted by COVID-19.
During her “dropout” year, she became the public face of the worldwide school climate strike movement. Thunberg has now returned to school. “My gap year from school is over, and it feels so great to finally be back in school again!” the 18-year-old tweeted.
Thunberg was diagnosed with Asperger’s six years ago. Tony Attwood, a world authority on Asperger’s, has found that people diagnosed are “usually renowned for being direct, speaking their mind and being honest and determined and having a strong sense of social justice.” Thunberg has acknowledged that her passion for her climate crisis work was partly down to viewing the world in stark terms. While acknowledging that her diagnosis has limited her before, Greta said it “sometimes makes me a bit different from the norm” and she sees being different as a “superpower.”
Well, I’d say so! Greta became Time Magazine’s youngest ever Person of the Year in 2019 and was included on the Forbes list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women the same year. She said on Twitter that before she started her climate action campaign she had “no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder.” She said she had not been open about her diagnosis of being on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to “hide” behind it, but because she knew “many ignorant people still see it as an ‘illness,’ or something negative.” Greta wrote “When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. Using the hashtag #aspiepower, she said “and then you know you’re winning!”
In July 2019, Thunberg hit back at the Australian News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt for writing a deeply offensive column that mocked her diagnosis. Bolt repeatedly referred to Greta’s mental health, saying she was “deeply disturbed.” Thunberg responded by tweeting that she was “deeply disturbed” by the “hate and conspiracy campaigns” run by climate deniers like Bolt.
The “contrived crisis” is the “destruction of the free market system” via a climate denial culture serving a “political system” funded by fossil fuel interests.
I don’t know about you, but I am “deeply disturbed” by the fact that of the almost 40,000 delegates at the U.N. COP26 in Glasgow, the largest number of delegates were the 503 people linked to the fossil fuel industry outnumbering the 497 delegates from Brazil, 165 from the U.S. and 230 from the U.K.
Greta tweeted, “I don’t know about you, but I sure am not comfortable with having some of the world’s biggest villains influencing & dictating the fate of the world.”
Is anyone else uncomfortable?
The “Connecting the Dots” column by John Bos appears every other Saturday in the Recorder. He is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times and his climate related op ed essays have been published in other regional newspapers. Comments and questions are invited at john01370@gmail.com.