Hunger for Survival

Every now and then I read a blog that announces that the writer has had an epiphany and wonder if I will ever start a post with that. I didn’t have an epiphany yesterday but I did change. A few months ago if you had asked me to attend a candlelight vigil for survival I might have scoffed. Tokenism would have been the word I used – a term that now I see I used far too lightly. Yesterday was Hunger for Survival – the day the disappointed, but not defeated {woohoo} youth at COP15 decided to fast for a day in solidarity with the millions of people who are going hungry, and will continue to go hungry, due to climate change. We were also fasting in support of a group of youth who have been fasting for 43 days for a good deal in Copenhagen.

I am one of those people who needs to eat every two hours – my happiness, and consequently the safety of those around me {as my roommates learned when I had two hours of fasting left} is dependent on the number of things I shove down my throat! So no food for an entire day seemed impossible – and in the words of the long-term fasters – this is why we fast – to show that what we see is impossible is actually possible.

Here’s what I realised – I realised that if Obama, if Manmohan Singh, if all these heads of state had fasted with us, they would have understood the fate they were sentencing people to.

I realised that if they had been with us as we stood in the room civil society has been relegated to {still disgusted with the UNFCCC for that} and had seen people’s expressions as they wrote letters and lit candles they would have finally felt the truth of climate change the way we do.

My fast started at 2 a.m. on December 17 and ended at 2:00 a.m. on December 18. By 11 a.m. on the 18th I was midly hungry, by 2:00 p.m., restless and by the evening, a downright crank. I spent my last minutes carefully arranging my food on the table – noodles, cookies, chips and a muffin and literally counted the seconds to when I could eat.

And as I stuffed my face, my day made sense. There were hundreds of us in that room bound by the simple ‘token’ act of fasting. And it is that moment that it created that will see us through the bad deal we are going to get. So if my participating in a ‘populist’, ’stereotypically youth activitist’ act of ‘tokenism’ helped the climate movement then I say it was well worth it.