Watch Dianne Feinstein Lecture Increasingly Crabby Kids Demanding a Green New Deal NOW!
If our politics cannot be sensible, they might as well be enjoyable. This confrontation easily clears that hurdle.
A group of kids and their adult handlers representing an activist group called Sunrise Movement Bay Area visited Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in her San Francisco office to demand that she commit to the Green New Deal resolution pushed by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
The confrontation is really kind of priceless (the full livestream is here), as everybody turns into a pill the longer they flap their gums. The kids are kinda cute at first as they ask the six-term senator to sign on to a "transformative" plan whose component parts, price tag, and schedule are so delusional that Democratic contenders for the 2020 presidential nomination are dragging it is "aspirational" and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) waved it away as "the green dream, or whatever they call it." But there's always something disturbing when kids who clearly have no idea what they're talking about are being used by adult activists.
In any case, Feinstein completely stiff-arms the kids, telling them that nothing is "going to get turned around in 10 years," which prompts one of the chaperones to speak up and chide the senator for her lack of urgency.
"You know what's interesting about this group," Feinstein observes at one point, "is I've been doing this for 30 years. I know what I'm doing. You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway." She lectures the kids that she just won re-election by a million votes and reiterates "I know what I'm doing."
Unsurprisingly, as things go on, the kids get crabby, with one of them shouting, "It doesn't matter! We're going to be the ones impacted!" One of the Sunrise adults chimes in, "We're asking you to be brave and do this for us and your grandchildren….Any plan that doesn't take bold, transformative action is not going to be what we need."
Below is a short version of the incident that was edited and released by Sunrise Movement Bay Area. The group also posted a recording of the full livestream, during which the sense of anger eases up about eight minutes in, when Feinstein forces her own version of an environmental action plan on to the kids and the adults. At the very close of the 15-minute livestream, one of the adults sighs, "We were met with a fair amount of condescension, to be perfectly honest."
If our politics cannot be sensible, they might as well be enjoyable. This confrontation easily clears that hurdle.