It’s impossible to be woke enough — and that’s a lesson extremist climate activists “Extinction Rebellion,” best known for disrupting traffic in major cities with “climate strikes,” grinding urban transit to a complete halt, is learning the hard way.
The organization, which aims to prevent the world from collapsing in an firey apocalypse in just over a decade by demonstrating with parades, puppets, and contemporary art installations, has been around for just over a year, but it’s now fallen afoul of woker critics who contend that “Extinction Rebellion” or “XR” for short, is just too white, too educated, too middle class, too privileged, and too “first world” to be adequate spokespeople for radical environmentalism.
In a CNN article published Sunday, reporter Aimee Lewis asked the all important question: is Extinction Rebellion just not woke enough?
The criticism stem, most pointedly, from a protest XR held last month in a working class neighborhood of London. Privileged white, upper crust youth and XR’s established elderly jumped on trains and chained themselves to the public transit cars in London’s subway, disrupting the morning commute of many people who told organizers that they could hardly afford to miss a day of work. The demonstrators could not have cared less, telling the commuters that saving the planet was more important than getting to work on time, even if that job was the only way those commuters could afford the basic necessities.
“Their protest — which disrupted thousands of people’s journeys to work — was rapidly criticized as wrongheaded and out of touch by members of the public, across social media and in the press,” CNN reported. “While it’s not clear who made the decision to protest at Canning Town on October 17, the negative response has helped to spark change and self-reflection within one of the world’s highest-profile environmental movements.”
CNN points out that XR considers itself “decentralized,” meaning that anyone can act in its name. But the organization’s heirarchy expressed support for the commute disruptors.
