Growing Something New

I am not an academic. Indeed I was accepted and briefly attended the honours program of History and Political Science at Canada’s most well known University McGill, but after writing for the papers there for a couple of months I promptly dropped out and went back to live on Kibbutz in Israel.

I ended up at the more urbain of Montreal’s English universities, Concordia, where I received a nominally good education in Communication Studies, but perhaps more importantly I received a minor in comparative religion reading the holy books from the majority of the world’s faiths after having spent much time in the seat of monotheism Jerusalem and even studying and practising some eastern spirituality on my own time.

Furthermore among my favourite writers is Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, who simply didn’t only pen one of the two quintessential utopian/dystopian books of the twentieth century, but wrote universalist spiritual books like the Perennial Philosophy and was anthologized in books like Huxley and God which I read and relished.

The point being in this secular capitalist world we now inhabit, I have always been looking for something more, while any religion, even my own, could not quite quench this desire, nor could general activism.

Again, this would all have to wait until Greta. And while I take to heart Bob Dylan’s words “Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters” and I urge others not to deify Greta, which is the last thing she would want anyhow, I think the movement she catalyzed, and which I really felt enmeshed in that 500,000 person Montréal climate march, can show us a way forward.