It was an interesting morning. Had discussion with a whole lot of schoolkids from Pahiatua by Palmerston North, a beef and lamb farmer and other members of the public.
Made another sign in situ. Mick, Yoyo and Violet came to support.
I had also chalked up the question from last week on the of Seddon Statue facing the Beehive: How can a city be as generous as a forest?
A swarm of the visiting school kids asked for the chalk and added pictures and signs.A few of them came up to me, firing a whole bunch of questions.
When I mentioned we should use cars less:
“What about if you live in the country? We can’t get on busses or trains”
“Yes,that is part of the problem. In that case we could use green cars”
“But, we can’t afford them.”
“Yeh, and what about the uranium of the batteries” another bystander listening put in.
“you mean Lithium?”
“We have a black car.” from another child.
Then we went into what ‘green’ meant in this context and this brought up the next question:what are fossil fuels?
It was a heated debate and the kids were great asking challenging questions. And not afraid to ask for clarification either.
Mick and I also talked to one young girl of 11, called Nova, about social inequity (though she did not use this term) and that it was not right. That poor people did not care because they could not buy proper food and did not have time. Nova also told us about ‘mean kids’ who threw a whole bunch of rubbish , empty food packages, at the houses of poor kids who had had food help during Corona. That their parents then had to deal with that, cleaning it up. “Then those young people get negative and don’t want to do stuff you know! “
She also felt that many teenagers were being negative.
I countered with ” What about Greta and all the school strikes? Not all young people are negative! ” She looked at Mick and I for a moment,
” You know I dream about that, about Nova making her mark on the world.”
We joked about her being a ‘SuperNova’. I promised I would write her ideas down in our E Tu blog. Nova copied our website details.
There was also an Iranian woman with her son demonstrating because her husband who was still in Iran was refused entry.
Being at the Seddon Statue is a whole window on life, and it can be quite confronting.
