You cannot skip the step of facing reality…

(a little dated but an excellent point…)

[…]

Jilly Edgar, 20, a New York University student and member of the Sunrise Movement, which advocates for Green New Deal policies, said she struggled to think of the future. That should be a time she said when “the world is becoming my own, and moving forward in it” marriage, graduate degrees, children.”

“But actually,” she said, “the world is dying. There’s just, like, a cutoff point. That does a lot to destroy the idealism of young people that usually pushes them to act.”

The ‘fear of fear’ is an obstacle to action, activists say

“The idea that ‘you can’t scare people, fear paralyzes people,’ has been a guiding principle of the gradualist climate movement for decades, and it’s horribly wrong and misguided,” said Ms. Klein Salamon, 33, who trained as a clinical psychologist.

“The basic tenet of therapy is that facing hard truths is how you create transformative change,” she said. “You cannot skip the step of facing reality. It’s only when we have a national consensus that we are all personally in danger, when we feel enough fear, that we are willing to make drastic changes. Fear is literally how we translate perception of danger into action.”

The mobilization to fight World War II, she said, is the closest parallel in recent history to the scale and urgency of effort needed, she said: “Pull every lever, have all hands on deck, spend without limit to save as much life as possible.”

The young activists of City Hall said they had all been through a phase of ‘climate despair,” but that what gave them hope was, as Ms. Edgar put it, “deciding to push for change, and urge people with power to make that same decision.” – Anne Barnard, Excerpt from New York Times article ‘A ‘Climate Emergency’ Was Declared in New York City. Will That Change Anything?