Astrologers do an identikit portrait of her personality from an interpretation of her character qualities, based on the positions of the planets at the hour of her birth. Instagram and Facebook are filled with images of her, demanding ‘How dare you?’ And almost from the first moment she speaks, her words and her expressions are transformed into a myriad memes and GIFs.
J.K. Rowling wrote about prophecies, and envisioned that children would rise from their enforced passivity in a crisis, and would save the world, in Book 7 of the Harry Potter series. This idea is opened up in the classical quotation at the beginning:
‘Oh, the torment bred in the race,
The grinding scream of death
And the stroke that hits the vein,
The hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
The curse no man can bear.
But there is a cure in the house,
And not outside it, no,
Not from others but from them,
Their bloody strife. We sing to you,
Dark gods beneath the earth.
Now hear, you blissful powers underground -
Answer the call, send help.
Bless the children, give them triumph now.‘ (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers)
Whitney Houston sang it in ‘The Greatest Love Of All’: ‘I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier.’
The children of today have grown up fast, and in many ways unprotected, in the shadow not of nuclear war as Generation X did, but amidst the collapsing structures of economic systems which have polarized the world and destroyed the habitat and the moral environment simultaneously.
But life finds a way: intelligent organisms survive because they adapt, and seek to not merely survive, but thrive and flourish. The wisest know that if a long term survival is wanted, this flourishing must be inclusive and not competitive in the ‘kill or be killed’, ‘win or lose’ ultimatum way that is modelled for us by many of the current leaders of the world.
It is the passing of the baton that is happening. Inter-generational respect given and demanded. And it is sustained in the actions of the Hogwarts students, hope of the future generations of the wizarding world. They organize, they rally, they defy the rising elements of fascism and sadism. They retreat underground, threatened and defiant, and go into formation; but they emerge with the ability as well as the will to create a better world. The difference I see is that there is a big picture vision available to them: something that is more than ‘Me Me Me’.
It seems as if the youth movement of 1968 is going through a recycling sequence: 50 years on, and fuelled by frustration and cynicism instead of idealism. Youth are rallying, but their collective uprising is being modified because they are also being rallied and herded. They have withheld themselves from corporate enslavement and the proffered icons of glorified wanderlust, boycotted the convenience of toxic consumables, rejected mechanistic education processes and embraced alternatives to binary thinking. But they are children, being scolded and told that they are disrespectful of their elders.
The sharp sparks of the Arab Spring, selectively televised protests against the Global Financial Summits, the transport disruptions in Hong Kong, the fresh-faced disaffected in their trillions are becoming fierce, in the way the sensitive do when hit too often.
'You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,' 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg thundered this week at world leaders at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York.
She has accused these leaders of ignoring the science behind the climate crisis, saying: 'We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth - how dare you!'
I have been thinking - with Greta’s voice echoing in my ears - of apocalyptic fairy tales and futuristic fiction: in William Goulding’s ‘Lord Of The Flies’, the entire structure of civilization devolves into a struggle for tribal supremacy amongst a group of children. The ending is a brilliant wake-up call: we have been so immersed in the politics and sociology of the brutal battle for survival that we have forgotten the protagonists are children. At the end, after people have been killed and democracy lies in ruins, an adult comes to rescue them and sees a bunch of children who look like savages.
In Orson Scott Card’s brilliant dystopic ‘Ender’s Game’, the global ‘threat’ takes the form of a space war, and the enemy is an alien race. The ‘soldiers’ who are trained to fight are children, aged 8, 9 and 10, recruited and trained in tactics and skill, and damaged immeasurably by their loss of childhood and their longing for its innocence and its possibility of spontaneity and joy. Ender the child protagonist is manipulated by the adults who are training him: they let him believe that the real war with its mass destruction of a species orchestrated by his special skillset is only a realistic training session. The truth devastates him.
Greta Thunberg is suspected by some of being used like a ventriloquist’s dummy to voice socialist political viewpoints, and this narrowing of her impact is disrespectful of the bigger picture she has so far managed to articulate. Child labor is used illegally throughout the world, and children are trafficked and utilized by predators and exploiters of all kinds. The rights of children have only comparatively recently been recognized. And more abuse is being reported all the time, and investigated and prosecuted by Royal Commissions.
What concerns me today is that the thunder and the anger being expressed and generated so fiercely will shortly become whimpers and muffled cries. That the fire of outrage will be doused. That the damage has been done, and the human race is run.
‘Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be,’ sang Whitney Houston. But she herself, and her only daughter, died tragically before their time. And J.K. Rowling’s wondrous imagination failed to provide her heroic, triumphant children with a life less ordinary in their mid 30s.
My favourite part of the last Harry Potter film was Professor Minerva
McGonagall making the statues coming to life, to help defend the embattled school. Somebody has made the equivalent of that spell happen, in the world today, and (all rhetoric and bluster aside) this may be the way the world we used to know, ends.
Out with the old. And the thread of continuity between the generations frayed so thin.
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