John, did you watch Don't Look Up over the holidays, or perhaps while in Omicron quarantine? 🤧

If you haven't seen the movie: GO WATCH IT. Yes, for Ariana Grande's new song, and Timothee Chalamet as a romantic punk, but really: As a young person in the climate movement, I've never felt so seen. 

Don't Look Up is a parable about the climate crisis, a mirror held up to our modern moment. Look past the absurdities, and the message is clear: We are in a global climate emergency. The people in power are self-interested and incompetent. Oh yeah: And we are going to die unless we do something. Now.

It was a good reminder of why I'm an organizer in the Sunrise Movement: I love this planet, and I love its people. I love being alive, and I feel so lucky to exist at this very moment and to feel love in all its forms – anger, fear, sorrow, joy, excitement, awe, wonder.

It is truly a privilege to be human, and this planet is a privilege. But we will lose it and all that we love unless we organize a movement ready to take on the government, take over the Democratic Party, take down the fossil fuel industry, and engage in creative, militant, and civil resistance. If you agree, can you make a contribution of $10 or any amount to Sunrise today to help us achieve our short-term and long-term goals in this fight for our future?

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I walked out of the theater (tbh, in tears 😭) with the question hot in my heart: How are we going to pull up on this slow death spiral and equip a generation to execute our mandate for a political revolution? 

Because just like the movie, the federal government is too spineless to take on climate change in a big way. Even the Build Back Better agenda, the legislation sprinkled with real climate commitments we worked so hard to make politically possible, is a bare minimum attempt that is stalling out in the Senate. 

I refuse to die because Joe Manchin wants to keep making millions off his fossil fuel investments, and the Democratic Party is unable to stand up to the oil, gas, and coal executive oligarchy that controls this country and fight for the rest of us.

I feel like Jennifer Lawrence breaking down on the talk show or Leonardo DiCaprio red-faced yelling into the camera. The stakes of this fight will only get higher, the suffering will become more painful, and we will have to continue to demand immediate, transformative, imaginative change at the biggest scale. The human mind created the climate crisis, capitalism, and fossil fuels — and the human mind can imagine, organize, and build the world that comes after. 

We are the only obstacle, and imagination is our only limit.

I'm an organizer in Sunrise because I want other things in life. My friends and I talk a lot about our dreams if not for the climate crisis. We did not grow up aiming to spend our lives metaphorically, and sometimes literally, screaming at the people in power about the asteroid hurtling towards Earth.

I just want to be the 25-year-old I know I am on a parallel planet: A struggling writer, overwhelmed in graduate school, stupidly in love, and talking about the names of our children with the girl I just swear I'm going to marry. Because in that world, I can have faith in a future, one habitable enough to feel okay having kids and investing my youth into a PhD. In that world, it doesn't feel like we live on the edge of the end.

But I'm in Sunrise to cultivate a faith in the future, so that one day, maybe, this world is closer to the parallel one of my dreams. My dreams only live in the version of the future that includes a habitable Earth. My dreams can only flourish in a United States that mobilizes against climate change, with institutions committed to intentional justice. My dreams only live if I am committed to acting even if the government does not, embodying true civil resistance to the climate crisis, telling all the young people heavy with despair the truth of our trauma, and offering a path of real hope.

This moment we live in is the end of the world as we know it. We will die if we do not get serious about the plain facts of climate change, the absolute recklessness of our fossil-fueled way of life. We need to look around — after closing out another hottest year on record marred by extreme weather, pushing our communities to the brink — the climate change crisis is already here. 

Really: what are we waiting for? Contribute $10 or any amount to help us continue building the movement necessary to fight climate change.

In love and solidarity,

Nikayla, Sunrise

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