All I really remember now is the music.
Ragtime on a Russian piano in one corner of the square; ‘Country Roads, Take me Home’ (CDs £5.00 from Wayne Avrili) in another. A little marionette playing ‘Halleluia’ on a violin very loudly, rather beautifully and completely artificially, just down the road. A bagpiper playing a lament on Westminster Bridge.
I had left home an hour earlier than I needed to for a series of meetings in London this morning, because I wanted to see Extinction Rebellion in Trafalgar Square for myself, and try to make my own mind up about what I thought. Too many other commentators were trying to make it up for me. And I know my London friends see it all the time but, marooned out here, I don’t.
And yes, I saw all the tents on the traffic-free roads, the well-being spaces, the service kitchens, kaftans and massage workshops; the Buddhism stand, the ‘oceans of tears’ flags on Nelson’s Column. I saw the ‘nuclear power, no thank you!’ stand, the CND tent, and the dubious posters being glared down at from his pedestal by Sir Henry Havelock KCB.
And yes, I saw the self-conscious chanting sessions, the Bob Marley tent and the mindfulness teachers with their tongues hanging out. And Boris Johnson’s ‘crusties’ walking past with their placards with that grubby look that comes from sleeping out overnight in a public square. And yes, at times it was very easy to think of the People’s Front of Judea scene from Life of Brian, and hard not to laugh.
And yes, I talked to the ladies down from Stroud, and the two lads over from Belgium with their bumble-bee leaflets. And I was politely ambushed by the student from Liverpool who asked me ‘what I thought of it all’. And I was asked in for a quick chant by a group from the Midlands, who had obviously never heard me chant. And they were all respectful, like the police who were looking over them, and like the people who were commuting on foot to work through them. And it was difficult to be angry.
And yet, yes, I saw the gridlocked traffic in the un-closed streets around, the delivery drivers banging their heads in frustration on their steering wheels, and the Uber driver in his electric car being prevented from saving the world by the people who claimed to be saving it just that bit more loudly than him. And I know, and try to understand, the arguments on both sides. Good people and good businesses are being seriously disrupted by it all, on the one hand, and we are still being accused of not listening, on the other.
And after an hour of it, I still didn’t really have any more of a clue, to be honest. Which is probably how it should be. I have read about 0.01% of the available science, and all I can say is that I remain persuaded that a) global warming is happening, b) that it is man’s activities that are accelerating it and c) something needs to be done about it, and quickly, an in a coordinated way. The argument is over the degree of urgency, and the how draconian it should be.
I have friends who think the whole thing is part of a left-wing plot to neuter our competitiveness, and I have friends- very close ones, as it happens- who are spiritually in Trafalgar Square right now, and who think we are already on our way to hell in a handcart. And I have friends of every shade in between. I know no more than any of them. I respect scientists but I’m not one.
But, for what it’s worth, I also re-learned three things out there today.
First, I just love this tolerant, slightly beleaguered country I live in. We forget too bloody often how privileged we are to have the right to peaceful protest, and that next time it might be ‘us’ wanting to make our point. Check out China. No, really check it out.
Secondly, our tolerant country has lost the ability to debate in shades of grey, and is poorer for it. ‘Today’, writes Douglas Murray in his new book on The Madness of Crowds, ‘nearly all public discussion has become impossible. Which is why nearly all public thinking has become impossible. Which is why the thinking has gone bad on nearly every major issue facing us’. A sixteen year old Swedish student, he goes on, has ‘become impossible to oppose without being cast out as a monster’. That matters.
And thirdly, the shit-storm that our national politics has become is preventing us from talking about, and dealing with, some very real challenges, of which this is but one. Brexit will be a mere atomic memory in a few years’ time, whilst other stuff won’t.
But I’ll tell you one other thing, too: the thirty-year period of it being acceptable to not really give a toss is long gone.
Giving a toss matters.
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