Ah, truancy. The very hallmark of courage and valor.
Or at least, that’s what TIME magazine seems to think, as they’ve officially named Great Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish child-turned-climate-activists who’s famous for…well, skipping school.
Thunberg, whose mom is an opera singer and whose dad is an actor,” has made her mark on the world in recent months for leading youth “climate strikes” across the globe, encouraging her fellow grade-school students to walk out of class to protest inaction on climate change.
She also made headlines for her passionate but otherwise ineffectual lecture aimed at world leaders at a recent UN conference.
Oddly, other than ranting about the problems she sees with humanity’s detrimental effect on the planet, Thunberg hasn’t been at the center of many news stories about any clean-up projects or actual efforts to address pollution, bad air quality, endangered species, or other man-made environmental calamities.
Still, TIME has decided she’s their “Person of the Year” because…well, I’m not sure, exactly. The best they were able to surmise is that the Swedish student (or former one, it seems) has “offered a moral clarion call to those who are willing to act, and hurled shame on those who are not.”
While TIME admits that Thunberg is “neither the first to sound the alarm about the climate crisis nor the most qualified to fix it,” the publication claims she is nonetheless the “most compelling voice on the most important issue facing the planet.”
Despite, you know, not actually doing anything about the supposed “most important issue facing the planet.”
“She has focused the world’s attention on environmental injustices that young indigenous activists have been protesting for years. Because of her, hundreds of thousands of teenage ‘Gretas,’ from Lebanon to Liberia, have skipped school to lead their peers in climate strikes around the world,” TIME explains.
That’s it. Skipping school. The thing Kamala Harris once proposed jailing parents for allowing their children to do is the reason why a teenage girl from Sweden is on the cover of an internationally published magazine as their No.1 most influential human on the planet.
But hey, play hooky it for a liberal cause and you, too, could be a face on a magazine. And you don't even have to make a difference to do it.