Outside a cellar door in the Old town of Stockholm is perhaps historically the most significant guttata. In this was, a summer night in the year 1768, clockmaker Jean Fredman in a state of severe ruelse, utslungande curses over the fact that he even been born: ”Oh, you are my mother, and say who you sent/to my father’s bed!” Even the wood of which the mother’s matrimonial bed made should, he argued, be eternally condemned.
Before the door to the tavern opened and their spirits return, the bakfulle the watchmaker – as the story is told in Carl Michael Bellman Fredman’s epistle n:o 23 – had time to proclaim a timeless judgment of the responsibility parents assume when they bring a child into the world. And this, therefore, throughout the 250 years before the word ”barnskam” was launched in the climate debate.
between the Bellman Stockholm and today’s Beirut. Or not. In the lebanese Nadine Labakis new movie ”Capernaum” goes to the protagonist, the old gatpojken Zain, a step further than Fredman. He not only curses his mother and father – he draws them to justice. ”Why do you want to sue your parents?” asks the judge. ”For they have given birth to me!” says Zain.
Read more: movie review: ”Capernaum” turn down biodörrarna and opens the world
”Capernaum” is a neorealistisk film for our time – probably the most striking one can see right now. The title alludes not only to the biblical city of tiberias, but also denotes ”chaos”. Prior to the work with the film overall Nadine Labaki on all the world’s misery that she wanted her movie would take up: the homeless children on the run from the war in Syria who have been beaten and raped, hopeless, poverty and ruthless exploitation, apathy for human life… She wrote up all of these topics on a slate and thought: ”This is chaos, this is hell.”
it certainly is. In researcharbetet before the film interviewed Nadine Labaki lots of children on the street and asked if they were happy to live. Many said no. Still portrays the movie the unbroken solidarity that can arise between people – not least the really small people – when the situation is darkest and the worst.
the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit published a lengthy roundtable discussion between some young people and their parents. The call was about the climate crisis and the new global youth movement that was initiated by the Swedish Greta Thunberg skolstrejk, but the theme was the same as in ”Capernaum”: a föräldragenerations debt for the world in which we now leave to our children. The three young people in the call attribute their parents debt, although no one, of course, goes so far as to want to bring them to justice. You have ”prokrastinerat the problem,” says 18-year-old James lucid.
Extra force to get the young people’s arguments, of course, by the fact that half of the carbon dioxide that humans have burned out in the atmosphere have been added in the last 30 years – thus, we have damaged the climate as much since the UN’s first climate conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, as during all the previous centuries together. The climate crisis we are now in the middle of the can not be blamed on past generations. The has we – with open eyes – created in the course of a lifetime.
the wavering between feelings of guilt and responsibility. Someone has voted green but not the ”living green”. Another refers to the fact that they did not have access to Whatsapp and Facebook and therefore could not organise themselves in the same way that today’s young people. A father admits that he worried more for war than for the climate, one recalls that it is his generation that has seen to it that the youngsters can go out on the streets and demonstrate.
I would not call what I feel towards my own children for the guilt; I think it is more about a sense of belonging and a profound concern.
the Call will be for the sake of no intermediate people’s court, where a bunch of fanatical gröngardister sets sinners to account, without an honest exchange of views between the people sitting in the same lifeboat. ”When I ask myself if I have a clear conscience, I must respond ‘no’,” says a dad. ”And it feels awful.” Young people complete with to promise each other to say if they ever notice that they start to become like their parents. ”Yes. So do we.”
that the German young people’s confrontation of her parents in Die Zeit grabs me as much as when little Zain is true its in the movie ”Capernaum”. Why? I don’t know if I would call what I feel for my own children for the debt; rather, it is about a sense of belonging and a profound concern and a great sadness over the risk that they might get to live in a world whose foundation is weaker and less stable than what they are today.
The climate crisis imposes on its tip is the basic instinct that almost all parents have: the operation to hand over a better life and a better world to their children. Even in the past föräldragenerationer have, of course, concerned about their children’s future, but ours can be the first to see the ground literally rent in twain for ever in our generations feet. We might thus also – just like zain’s parents in ”Capernaum” – both guilty and victims at the same time.
One of the mothers in the call in Die Zeit puts it so nicely when she is in a conciliatory gesture, says to one of the young people: ”We, as parents, are affected by the climate crisis as much as you do. Because we love you.”
Read more by Björn Wimans chronicles of the climate crisis – and about the book ”Late on earth. 33 thoughts on the world’s biggest news” .