Peasant Queen
After all the preening and power plays in Copenhagen, I found it kind of refreshing to see the Queen of England, who is 83 years old, climb down from her throne and climb on a train, as if she were just one of us trying to make her way home for Christmas. Of course it was PR for dealing with global warming by using public transportation but the Queen doesn’t have to run for re-election so she didn’t really need to do that.
I’ve always thought that elective office should be open to anyone, that campaign expenses should come from a small taxpayer-supported fund and that people should be elected for their job skills. The administration full of competent administrators, a congress of effective managers. What a radical idea!
And then maybe we could find a spare monarch around somewhere to represent us on the international stage, one who wasn’t too proud to take the train - which is true leadership.
Ah, but instead we have “summits” like the fiasco in Copenhagen. That wasn’t even a fig leaf. The only good thing about it was the alternative conference called Klimaforum which operated by consensus and represented those of us who are not major shareholders in the world’s largest corporations and financial institutions - which happens to be 99% of the humans on the face of the earth - who are not happy about how things are going, any of us, north, south, east, west, southern hemisphere, northern hemisphere, african, caribbean, the poor in rich countries, the indigenous not to mention all the animals, birds, reptiles, bugs, etc, etc, etc.
I would have loved it if Ecuador, the first country to write a constitution giving inalienable rights to nature, had brought an ark to symbolically represent this constituency.
This is the time for symbolic acts and street theater. This is the time for the lowly to be raised up and those who are highly placed to serve. Some of them get it. Desmond Tutu gets it, the president of Tuvalu gets it. It looks like the queen gets it, too.
Way to go, yr Majesty!
December 24th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I’d guess it is kind of like taking baby steps. A mere symbolic act can lead to more meaningful steps. You have to start somewhere.