Startup Fiance

This video is from the UN Earth Summit in 1992. The speaker is 12 year old Severn Suzuki (Wikipedia entry for Severn Cullis-Suzuki), and her childrens group ECO (Environmental Childrens Organization) raised all the funds needed to speak at the conference.  Has anything changed?

Look at this video, look closely at the body language of the audience.  While what I saw might have partly been due to the fact that a lot of the people were listening to the monotone voice of a translator, instead of the electrically charged tones of this child, but regardless, no one in the crowd shows any sort of emotion at all.  I wish I agreed with the commentary of the video poster that they look like they are on the verge of tears, but it is almost as if they are making an effort to try to block her out of their minds.  This brave young girl is begging and pleading for our world’s leaders to listen to what she has to say, and change their ways, and the only respsonse she receives is brief applause when she exits the stage; she could have gotten a better response from a middle school aged audience after Romeo and Juliet.

This is one of the most articulate and well-written speeches I have heard during my 25 years on this planet; it is just too bad that the message was lost on its target audience. Our world’s leaders did not care then, and do not care now, about other people’s children. War is much more profitable than peace. Endless cycles of war are the perfect answer to ensuring the futures of their own children, all while hurting, killing, and endangering the lives of children all over the globe.

How did we get to the point where 95% of the world’s food production and distribution are controlled by 5 companies, and 96% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of less than 1% of the world’s population?  Are these companies to blame for capitalizing on the opportunity to establish a monopoly and control the world’s wealth?  Who is really to blame? We are.

We are the apathetic ones that chose to sit back and hope that problems would resolve themselves on their own.  We enabled those responsible for our present state of demise to continue their actions and get away with it. Now, 16 years after this speech was given, they have effectively destroyed our planet, and enslaved us all in the process.  The Patriot Act, FISA, RFID chips – this is all legislation we allowed to happen, by choosing to not get involved and expecting our government to “do what is right”. Wake up!

“I’m only a child and I don’t have all the solutions, but I want you to realize neither do you…if you don’t now how to fix it then please stop breaking it.”