Greetings from Finland – don’t give up!
With this short story I want to cheer you up, climate activists, when the news today are depressing and you might feel frustrated and down.
Finland’s largest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat organized a rhetoric competition for candidates in the municipal elections. The last short speech was supposed to include one quote from our former president Mauno Koivisto and one quote from this year’s Finnish Eurovision Song Contest song, Erika Vikman’s “Ich komme”.
The winner of the competition was MP Saara Hyrkkö, Greens. Her winning speech is for all of us who day after day continue to work for better future:
“If we don’t know for sure, how it will go, let’s assume, it will go well (Mauno Koivisto). Well, quite often this world makes us think that: fuck, what a shit! The climate is getting warmer and the species are disappearing and Temu junk is filling the earth.
But then: I look around. I listen to the blackbird and say hello to the Climate Grandparents, who are campaigning on the stairs of the parliament.
I think about our unique planet and think: that’s what it’s like, when you fall into a heat (or into a rut, “Ich komme”).
Hope. It comes from action. And yet it can happen that everything can go quite well.” (transl. PH)
https://www.hs.fi/helsinki/art-2000011144631.html (in Finnish)