People Are Afraid Of Change, Not Climate Change
Credit to Author: Johnna Crider| Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2019 19:06:37 +0000
Published on December 5th, 2019 | by Johnna Crider
December 5th, 2019 by Johnna Crider
Unless someone is breaking a hundred dollar bill or receiving change from a purchase, people do not like change, especially when it comes to the fact that they are being told they need to change their habits or their way of thinking. In fact, we humans often resist and attack those who are demanding for us to change. We take it personally and blame the messenger, treat them as if they are the “bad guy” when in fact the change they are demanding is for us to save ourselves.
The endless conspiracy theories and denial of facts.
The lies, hate and bullying of children who communicate and act on the science.
All because some adults – terrified of change – so desperately don't want to talk about the #ClimateCrisis
This is hope in disguise.
We're winning. pic.twitter.com/fFGlCXWVqy
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 4, 2019
A tweet by a teenager, a child as some would call her, is more important than those by our current President of the United States. While Trump attacks celebrities like John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, Greta Thunberg is honing in on a major issue that should be the major issue for every country on this planet. The thing is, people would rather bicker over the fact that humans deserve basic rights. They would rather have Twitter wars condemning black people for being concerned about police brutality, or mocking people for believing in others.
They would rather blame anyone with darker skin, women who wear hijabs, and people who don’t speak English as the source of their misery than face the fact that they, like the rest of the human race, all play a part in creating the havoc that is now climate change and the crisis we are dealing with on a global level.
Greta Thunberg isn’t the only person who has been criticized by her demands for change. Elon Musk isn’t the only person who was mocked by other carmakers when he started the production of electric vehicles. Elon is continuously mocked by his peers, many members of the media, and of course his critics. The two are two totally different people but are on the same team — Team Humanity — and those who are on that team are often the butts of crude jokes. These jokes stem from a deep-seated fear of change, that you — yes you, dear reader — need to change how you think and act in order to be a better version of yourself. How dare I ask this of you, you may wonder.
Did you know that people used to be just as upset over the fact that they were told to wash their hands as they are now about the environment, race relations, and other topics relevant to today? There was once a doctor named Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis and his story is tragic. He had realized that when doctors washed their hands before examining or treating patients, the mortality rate for women who were under his care was greatly reduced. Dr. Semmelweis was an obstetrician, a doctor who specialized in childbirth, which was one of the main causes of death among women until modern medicine was developed. He discovered that the puerperal fever, a fever that would infect women who had given birth and was as common as AIDS is in our day, could be drastically cut by washing his hands.
In the hospital where Dr. Semmelweis worked, many doctors often examined diseased corpses in the morgue and would then treat women giving birth. They would do this without washing their hands. When Dr. Semmelweis discovered that washing his hands helped, he wanted to share this knowledge. He couldn’t explain why it worked — they didn’t know about germs back then. He just noticed that his patients no longer caught diseases or ran fevers. However, the tragedy is that people refused to believe him. He was even institutionalized in an insane asylum in Vienna where he was beaten badly by guards. He died two weeks after being institutionalized. When he died, the hospital he worked at began to “run properly” again, by dismissing his ideas of washing hands before treating patients. The mortality rates increased, but it was business as usual.
Today, we are seeing ideas of the past make a return. Things such as the flat earth idea, which has been disproven, ideas that life-saving vaccinations are not good for you, and the incorrect argument that climate change is not real. The fact that these ideas are coming back is downright scary. Regarding climate change, the Earth is 4 billion and some odd years old and has had several major climatic changes in the past. If it wasn’t for climate change, we may not have even evolved. The Earth was once frozen and pretty much uninhabitable. (The Ice Age wasn’t just a movie, but an actual event.)
Change is constant, but humans are comfortable in their routines. We wake up every morning, have our coffee and sometimes breakfast if there’s time, go to work, come home, have dinner, and so on. Families with children have school and everyone has errands to attend to. It’s a daily ritual that we have all gotten comfortable with and changing one aspect of that ritual means we have to get uncomfortable. People do not like discomfort. This is why during the civil rights movement accepting that black people are just as human as we are and have the same rights are we do was so radical — it meant that those believing that black people didn’t deserve rights had to change their line of thinking and accept the fact that they were wrong (“they” being the oppressors).
In other words, admitting that a black person had the same rights as a white person meant that the white people of that time had to own up to the fact that not only were they wrong, but that they were actually harming innocent people because of their ill-founded beliefs. And add to that the fact that this hatred was taught by their parents — they would have to confront the fact that their parents were okay with hurting people and even killing them because of the color of their skin.
That was a hard pill for many to swallow, and many didn’t swallow it. Some did, but many hid their racism, taught that racism to their children, and we are seeing the results of that today. Hate is taught. In order for humans to survive evolution, we need to teach love and not hate.
I have a friend whose parents did some volunteer work in the Gaza Strip years ago. She often says that, “If you take a Muslim man and a Jewish man and put them both in a suit, they look a lot alike. You can’t tell who is Muslim and who is Jewish, but they hate each other so much over race, religion, and persecution that has been going on for many years.” The point she was making was that if we took away our labels, our separateness, and our manufactured identities, we would see that we are all human. We are all members of the same race — the human race.
In order to evolve, humans need to not only embrace change but also look at themselves and grow. Face your wrongs, and learn to have compassion for other beings. It’s not your fault that you were taught hatred, but you are responsible for your own actions even if they were made ignorantly. Waking up from that means realizing that you learned something wrongly and it is not too late to undo it. Mocking Greta and Elon isn’t going to change your life or make your situation better. Only you have that power.
Follow CleanTechnica on Google News.
It will make you happy & help you live in peace for the rest of your life.
Johnna Crider Johnna Crider is a Baton Rouge artist, gem and mineral collector, and Tesla shareholder who believes in Elon Musk and Tesla. Elon Musk advised her in 2018 to “Believe in Good.” Tesla is one of many good things to believe in. You can find Johnna on Twitter