I find it weird that there's so many older people captured by this movement. You expect younger people to be more idealistic but these women should know better by now.
A lot of them seem to be retired teachers, doctors and whatnot so I think there is a bit of boredom and wanting to carry on doing something that makes an impact but without the paperwork. But I genuinely think there is a lot of class differences driving it - protestors come across as really disliking the working class and target us as a matter of course.
Going back a little: a relative was a policeman on the Greenham Common Protests - it was all older / retired bored middle and upper class women on an adventure holiday…none of the press ever seemed to report on the simple fact that they were always trying to breach an American base. The police were simply trying to keep the women from being happily machine gunned down by US troops who made it clear that they would regard any protestor gaining entry to their site as a hostile (height of Cold War and stuff to do with the base being American soil) - reminds me about how the police are desperately trying to protect environmental protestors from infuriated members of the public today.
Going back even further, a lot of
balls equating Just Stop Oil with the Suffragettes being thrown around too. Historically, those poshos specifically didn’t want the vote for working class women (again, a lot of these protestors really don’t like us). And their antics actually put back the rights of women for a time - it was the actual Suffragists who got us the vote and the first female MP was Lady Astor, who was not a suffragette.
Positive stuff is happening (wind farms, energy going carbon neutral, reduction of plastics, house insulation etc) but it is happening in spite of some bored posh folk seeking relevance, not because of them.
At least that’s what I tell myself when I get plipped in the face with the new style recyclable plastic caps on drinking bottles.
