On March 15, 2019, in many cities around the world, one million children marched under the banner of “Climate Strike.”

Why should we go to school? Why should we prepare for a future that we will not have? We want you to panic. Then what?

This movement is a rebellion against extinction. (Can you rebel against extinction?) Simultaneously, this is the beginning of a culture of transitoriness and of rage against those who have engendered us.

Zain, the protagonist of the movie Capernaum (2018), directed by the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, is a twelve-year-old Syrian boy who lives with five siblings in a refugee camp in the metropolitan chaos of Beirut. Zain was not marching with Greta Thunberg and other youth activists on March 15, 2019; having been summoned by a judge, he demands that his parents be prosecuted for the crime of giving birth to him.

Zain is the perfect symbol of the children’s crusade that is mounting everywhere: an immense crowd of innocent victims who want to know why they have been compelled to abandon the blank immortality of eternal Nothingness, why they have been summoned, assembled in this awkward city of violence, in the sad murkiness of precarity and anguish. Why did you force me out of my space of dispassionate nonbeing into the fog and fury of exhaustion?

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In 2008 David Benatar published Better Never to Have Been.  Of note is his observation/decision that suicide is not an answer to the situation. I’m not clear whether his book had any bearing on the children’s demonstrations abut climate change.

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The news in America reports that president elect Donald Trump does not believe in climate change (he plans to “drill baby, drill” his first day in office.  However, the other half of the privileged two–Elon Musk–is reported to be a believer (and worrier?) about climate change.  We’ll have to see how this issue gets resolved….or not.