Mashed Potatoes

I promise, there will also be other topics in future posts; but not today…

Glue on streets and food on art, 
repeats each day, matter of heart? 
"Not really," says the scientists 
who gets the gist and is quite pissed 
by egoists that do insist that a cold week 
refutes the claim of climate change:
"To blame are others anyway." 
The charts are clear, the problem sheer unsolvable; 
each year is worse, each choice adverse,
the globe does not reverse its course – quite yet.

They marched on Fridays for a while, 
but didn't reach the other isle:
Of people who don't care and stare 
on their small screens where it just seems 
as if the world is fine right now;
of people who don't share the bare
reality of what's to come;
of people who are still concerned 
about their hard-earned treasuries
and do revel in memories about the past
as if they last apocalypse.

And now they found what upsets most: 
A simple frowned upon protest
– where streets are used as seats –
defeats the calmness of the crowd 
that clings to cars and is in rage
about the new found stage.
In galleries they do reside
throw calories with pride to guide
social debate where it belongs:
What are the values we esteem?
Why does it have to be extreme?
Why do we tolerate the wrongs?
And try to acclimate as if 
the floods would stop? As if the crop
grows magically? While livestock drops
quite tragically dead onto barren desert floors –
necessity starts frightful wars.

Who really are the radicals?
Who really are the extremists?
Those who request a fair world
and are obsessed with equity?
Or those who halt the change,
assault the poor, default to strange
conventions from the past and cast
a future for us all that will, at last,
result in unsurpassed distress?
What is allowed, what justified? 
This climate activism does
indeed evoke more buzz
than any boring chart. Apart:
It has a heart, and does still act in peace.

Unfortunately, no matter how many climate change conferences are arranged, the large-scale subsidization and expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure continues to take place with each passing month. However, the immediate halt of any further investments into these sources of energy are one of the key factors to mitigate the climate emergency, according to the latest IPCC report. To the best of our knowledge, we steadily continue our path to more than 3 degrees of global warming, if we are lucky and tipping points don’t start to blow up all around us (and the likely do). If the choice is between some paintings and many many lives, I am gladly taking the latter.