Is activism contemporary monasticism?
IIRC, European medieval age societies used or required monasticism to carry out or legitimate deviant behaviour (in retrospect, some of it good, some of it bad) by saying that monks are doing the religious work for them.
I don’t think consider Thunbergs behaviour bad or not noteworthy, but I think our work isn’t exactly to heroise Thunberg as a person and be done with the topics.
I want to point out that is not what you said, but that’s what a lot of people read into this.
Punk and anarchism had this mantra of “kill your idols” and what is meant by that, is that we should turn our heroes back into actionable behaviours of people like you and me.
I mean, the speech on 4th September 1940 for example is not that dissimilar.
Caveat
I’d recommend Americans look for villains in their own history though, because in the US perception, Nazi Germany is far away and alien (“Look what those weird people over there are/were doing, we would never do that and if, it would be them possessing us/our leaders”)
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