WHEN you look at the way Donald Trump dishes out blame without taking responsibility, the way the UK Government has dodged scrutiny over its Brexit obsession and the way Labour and the LibDems abandoned commitments to local democracy and the climate emergency this week by voting against more powers for councils on transport, courage appears to be an outmoded value to many of our leaders and public figures.
In fact, these are examples of cowardice. Cowardice is the inability to self-reflect, to change your mind or seek a consensus. The inability to seek consent is also cowardice, as evidenced in the high-profile cases of sexual harassment, or even in common cases of groping someone or wolf-whistling.
Courage is to ask someone’s consent to touch them. It is to admit your mistakes. It is to recognise what is needed and when.
Look at Pia Kemp, the German boat captain and migrant rights worker who broke the law to rescue thousands of migrants at sea. That is courage.
In the face of the very real threat of human extinction, of the extinction of 95% of all life on earth, we need the courage to stand up and say: things are going to have to change.
READ MORE: Climate change highlighted as Scottish team recreates iconic glacier image
We need to do politics and power differently. We should demand courage from our leaders, like the climate strikers are.
The UN’s climate science tells us things are going to change dramatically one way or the other. Our ice is melting faster, sea levels are rising faster, food and water shortages are increasing, and vast populations are increasingly relocating in the hopes of finding more inhabitable parts of the planet to live on.
We can wait placidly while these events overtake us, or we can make equally dramatic and substantial change to prevent our destruction. These are the only two options.
The first option delegates our courage to our young people, the millions who, in a few decades, could face starvation, thirst and violence in a much harsher environment. We can assure ourselves that “our” kids and grand-kids will probably be fine, it will be “other” people’s kids who suffer the worst.
Or we can have the courage to admit this is really happening,
that we can prevent this suffering and destruction, we can do something about it, but everything is going to have to change.
Change needs to start right now, not after Brexit is done, not after Scottish independence is done. Right Now.
We have to find the courage to stand up and make the “winners” of neoliberal capitalism, the private jet owners, the families with two SUVs, the flying three-holidays-a-year executives aware that they are a big part of the problem. Meanwhile, those people who are living on two or less tonnes of carbon a year, a tiny ration of the 12-15 that most Europeans live on, the poor are already leading the way.
The fact is it isn’t them who are trashing the planet. Like those people, most people will need to learn how to re-use, how to enjoy a holiday without air travel, how to value people, relationships and community over ownership of things.
When standing for election as co-leader of the Scottish Greens,
I put out a challenge to the women of the party that we need to correct the gender imbalance of our parliamentary group as well as increasing our number of MSPs in 2021. In other words, I have asked the women of the Scottish Green Party to have courage.
It takes a great deal of courage to stand for selection and for election. It exposes you to abuse on social media, it requires you to speak in public, it opens you up to criticism about your appearance and the way you dress. Politics is still predominantly a rich, privately educated man’s world, and to ask ordinary women to step into it we are asking them to overcome their internal sense that they don’t belong there, that feeling that they are an imposter. After the death of Jo Cox, I am in a very real sense asking these women to put their lives in danger to represent their values and speak up for their communities.
I am delighted and glowing with pride that 29 women and non-binary members of the Scottish Green party found their courage and put their names down for selection. Among this number are women of colour, disabled women, young women, older women, trans women, women with four children, women with no children, women with university degrees in science, social services or engineering and women with no degrees at all. Watch out for them as we reveal our candidates at conference this weekend.
These courageous Scottish Green women will win seats at Holyrood and they will make waves. They will speak up for their communities, they will speak up for the planet. They will work with their every breath for peace, sustainability, equality and grassroots democracy.
This is what democracy looks like. This is what change looks like. This is what courage looks like.
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