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| What climate change looks like |
You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that's never been the source of our progress. That's how we cheat ourselves of progress.
You have to go through life with more than just a passion for change – you have to have strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes. Change requires more than righteous anger. To bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in customs.That's not sexy but it's true. He didn't go into it specifically but I think this is especially great advice as applied to the most important issue of our time and the greatest challenge any young generation has ever faced: climate change. It's so overwhelming a problem that I think the younger generation of activists will become more and more focused on this singular problem as time goes on and the president's advice will become even more salient. It couldn't be more difficult in terms of organization and strategy, requiring not just the cooperation of domestic political rivals but actors and interests all over the planet. And it's almost certainly going to require a lifetime of focus and commitment. Several lifetimes actually. I wish them well.