Listening to Greta Thunberg gives me some sense of what those French knights who followed her into battle must have felt.
“I am called Joan the Maid, and am sent to say that the King of Heaven wills that you be crowned and consecrated in your good city of Rheims, and be thereafter Lieutenant of the Lord of Heaven, who is King of France. And He willeth also that you set me at my appointed work and give me men-at-arms. For then will I raise the siege of Orleans and break the English power!”
The right wingers attacking her parents for “filling her full of anxiety” are full of shit.
My parents lived and died by the mantra that you “shouldn’t talk about politics or religion” and yet when I was even younger than Greta I remember not doing my homework the night the Russians invaded Afghanistan. I found watching the news reports terrifying. I thought there was going to be a nuclear war. I was “filled with anxiety” with no hope from my parents at all.
How odd that years later I would witness the poison fruit of Ronald Reagan’s arming of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan when I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11. Perhaps if my parents and their generation had paid more attention to politics and religion 3000 people wouldn’t have died. Children often understand the world better than adults. I knew that “politics and religion” were important, however ferociously my parents tried to deny it, and I was “filled with anxiety” by their indifference.
Writers Without Money 