Fill the Hill demonstration on Climate Change

I went to the Fill the Hill event on Parliament Hill yesterday that was one of some 4,000 demonstrations around the world in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate change talks.

They didn't quite fill the Hill, but they had more than the "hundreds" the Citizen reported. I'd say at the peak they had 2,000 there, maybe more. And it was a mostly young crowd. Very angry at Harper and what we used to call "the establishment" in my day of protesting . The only MP I saw there was NDP Paul Dewar. A lot of Green Party signs and the Unitarians and Raging Grannies were out in force.

One of the speakers said, "We don't want government to tell us to change our light bulbs. WE WANT GOVERNMENT TO CHANGE OUR LIVES."

?

Got a lot of cheers, too.

Thank you, but I DON'T want government to change my life. I want God, the real living God, to change my life. So that I will voluntarily pare back my lifestyle and give to the poor, visit the sick and so on. When government forces you, then all virtue and all charity is banished from the equation.

Back to the rally. How I remember those things when I was younger and yearning for, er, something transcendent, bigger than myself.

At the end of the rally, they taught everyone to use their arms like the hands on the face of a clock to "Tck Tck Tck" towards doomsday or something because the level of carbon in the atmosphere has risen to 390 ppm, when it should be 350 ppm and unless we dial things back, life as we know it on the planet will be unsustainable.

So, here were these 2,000 people all tilting like windmills. They were supposed to be in unison.

But they weren't. They seemed to be having a lot of fun.

I dunno. I would feel silly doing something like that. But then I'm 60.
Back in the day, I chanted, "One two three four, we don't want you f*cking war."
I hope I never chanted "No justice, No peace" Ugh. I hate that almost as much as I hate the "Hey hey, ho, ho blah blah blah has got to go."

These were mostly nice Canadian kids with a smattering of old lefties.

In a way it makes me a little sad because the "collective" is no replacement for "communion."

And environmentalism ---I don't know---there is a big difference between wanting to be a good steward of your environment vs. wanting some big government scheme to take control over your life to socially engineer radical equality.

Dr. Sanity has a diagnosis:

This leftist/radical environmentalism is nothing more than one of the rhetorical strategies that are being used to undermine democracy and capitalism and promote socialism/communism and fascism. Rarely do you see the agenda so openly discussed as it is in the articles quoted above. Instead of creating the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' the neo-marxists among us have settled on the 'dictatorship of the scientific elite'.

In reality, they always intended for a few intellectual 'elites'(they mean themselves, actually) to have the power to run things. but at least they hid that agenda behind the 'power to the people' bullshit rhetoric.

Now, they don't even bother to disguise their agenda. Or, even bother to deny that it was the same kind of marxist/socialist/communist--i.e., LEFTIST, policies that have most polluted the environment and destroyed the planet.

BTW, those lightbulbs from hell? I stayed at a place recently where they had them in every light socket except a high intensity desk lamp and I could barely see in this dim, grayish light. I HATE them. And a friend of mine broke one accidentally and was told it would cost her $1,000 to have the mercury inside properly cleaned up. Hello?