There's a thirteen-year-old girl sitting in the metro with a piece of cardboard she's painted with marker. She has written that she is too young to vote on her own future. You can picture it. A girl on her way into the city with a sign she made herself, because someone convinced her that the future depends on whether she shouts loud enough.
I'm a father - and a changed man for being one - so my heart naturally beats for children and young people. I sit and look at it, and something won't stop hurting. It's been like that for me for a long time.
Because at the age of thirteen, the world should be opening up for her, not closing in around her. These are the years when you discover music, friends, yourself. When you find your own boundaries and feel for what makes you happy all the way through. It's Childhood's last, long breath before seriousness comes on its own, the way it always comes. As all adults know, it needs no help.
Instead, she describes in her op-ed in Berlingske how it began.
The worry came with the news.
Read that sentence again.
And once more.
Did you catch it?
Where did the worry come from?
The worry came with the news. Then came the shame, which she herself writes was almost worse. And then she found the relief - the uncomfortable feelings dissolve when she acts, and that's why she keeps going.
Again. Read it again, slowly.
A child was given a fear as a gift, and was then handed the cure for the fear by the same hands that gave it.
The movement she chose became the only place where the anxiety settled. This is not a rebellion. This is a child trying to comfort herself for an unrest we placed inside her.
And let me say it clearly, so there is no doubt.
I blame her for nothing. She is doing exactly what a child does when the adults around her reward it. A thirteen-year-old does not lift herself onto the front page of one of the country's largest newspapers. There was an editorial office that said yes. There was a movement of adults with an agenda. There was a press photographer who set up the lights in front of Christiansborg. There were those who encouraged it, carried it forward and made sure it was sent in.
She was not born onto that front page. She was carried there. And my grief is not for her.
It is for us.
Because it is one of the oldest maneuvers there is. To let a child carry what the adults themselves don't dare touch. Because the child's face is the only thing you can't really argue against, and so you send it to the front.
She herself tells about the school visits, about that fourth-grade class where about ten raised their hands, because they, as she writes with her thirteen years of life experience, 'understood the seriousness'.
I know it's supposed to be read as a victory. But I can't bring myself to. I read that we have begun teaching ten-year-olds to be anxious and call it 'understanding'.
She writes it herself, by the way, more clearly than most adults manage, that the responsibility lies with those who have voting rights and power, not with the child. And yet it is her standing in the Parliament courtyard shouting, while the adults who gave her the fear watch from a distance.
She ends by saying that the minors are standing in a waiting room knocking on the door, because 'the adults are burning down the house around them'…
It's a powerful image. It's also the saddest thing in the entire text. Because a child should never have been standing in that waiting room to begin with.
Let me write it as clearly as I can.
A culture that does not shield its children from the adult world's ideological machinery, a machinery so strong that it can extinguish both reason and conscience in the strongest of us, has thrown the most sacred thing it possesses on earth into disarray. And it has managed to do so while telling itself it was doing it out of love.
A child should never have stood alone knocking.
There should have been an adult, a culture and a society standing between her and all of it - and orienting her toward life's incomprehensible beauty, love, depth and mystery.
❤️🔥🪽
Wishing you a good week.
