Undercover at Just Stop Oil
The man in cat ears said it best...
#35. Just Stop Oil
He looked like a cyberpunk bouncer, all five foot six, standing outside the graveyard - bright orange vest, mirrored sunglasses, and sickly green mullet.
He inspected my Eventbrite ticket – a two- hour workshop with Just Stop Oil – and stepped aside. I’d dressed down partly to fit in and partly because I’d just got off a long flight, belching noxious fumes across Europe like some kind of big, flying Frenchman.
I climbed up the long pathway to the church and stepped inside the hall, hushed whispers echoing off the linoleum floor. Bodies were arranged in a circle in the centre. I sidled to an empty chair and sat quietly. The man next to me, early forties, business casual and rosy cheeks, quizzed me on my credentials.
‘Got to be wary of people who’ve come to troll,’ he conspired, eyeing me up and down. I chuckled.
Clap clap, and the hushes fell silent, faces turning towards the point of noise – horn-rimmed glasses perched upon an entirely bald head and upturned nose that made her look like Nosferatu. She wore a canary t-shirt twittering Quakers for Justice – and here in this church hall, proselytising about the hellfire to come as penance for our consumerist greed, she was quaking indeed.
She explained that she didn’t want to be there, planning to break the law. She was a head girl, she said, and the other women laughed in agreement. I thought about the head girls I knew at school, priggish and officious, humourlessly enforcing the rules on everyone else.
Sentiments rippled around the circle, as each attendee introduced themselves in turn.
‘I’m just looking for hope,’ sighed one woman, middle-aged and middle-classed, with mid-range glasses and Midazolam eyes. Most of them were like this. The only stand-out was Harrie, a lanky man in his sixties, wearing cat ears and a tail.
The group turned to me. Well, of course I do care about the planet. I mean, does anyone want the world to end? I’m just not sure it is. I didn’t say any of that, and instead I explained I’d seen all the press about Just Stop Oil and wanted to hear what they had to say for themselves. I think they read between the lines.
Cyberpunk Bouncer pulled out his laptop and rested it upon his neon patchwork trousers, legs trembling. His clownish attire screamed arrested development. He lamented that he was simply a nursery teacher, he never expected to be involved in an activist group like this.
He started rambling from his laptop, throwing out stat after stat, tears welling in his eyes as he painted images of the apocalypse – ‘tarmac melting’, ‘forests burning’ – without context or detail, and parroted temperatures as arbitrary and intangible as the ‘R number’. His biggest fear, he said, teary-eyed and shaky-legged, was the hysteria that climate change would cause.
‘NO!’
A gargantuan man with a bomber jacket and freshly shaved head lunged up from the comically small chair wedged beneath him, sending it screeching backwards.
‘This is bonkers! You’re all bonkers. Absolute nutters, the lot of ya!’
The group was flustered. They fussed and cooed, urging him to leave. This wasn’t a place for him, they said.
‘It’s not bonkers, it’s the IPC! It’s science! You’re living in a fantasy,’ screamed the man dressed as a cat.
‘Nutters!’ The bald man lurched towards a door and stormed through, slamming it behind him.
‘That’s the wrong door,’ offered Harrie. ‘That’s storage. The exit’s that way’, and after a few seconds the bald man shuffled out, eyes down.
Cyberpunk Bouncer brought us to quiet. ‘We’ll have no debate about it,’ he admonished. ‘This is not the place for climate sceptics or climate deniers, so if that’s your game,’ looking round, eyes narrowed, ‘you better leave now.’
It was sad: one side yells ‘nutter’, one side ‘denier’, and neither can talk to the other.
He rained more brimstone onto the crowd, wearing us down and revving us up with fear and despair, melting us into emotional soup. Now it was over to his colleague, a shrewish, deafish woman, to give us form, driving our passions through actionable tips for protest and disruption.
Now we’re talking, I thought. I’m not really into all the climate stuff, personally, but messing with the government? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I sat forward and raised my hand.
‘What about a tax strike?’ I suggested (I’d been reading Thoreau). ‘I mean, if you want to get the government’s attention as you say, that must surely be the best way to do it? It wouldn’t upset the public either.’
After some murmuring, they weren’t feeling it. ‘I just want to march,’ one woman enthused, and the others’ eyes lit up. I realised there was something psychologically gratifying to them about annoying the public, about lying in traffic and receiving vitriol. It fulfilled some sort of self-hatred, perhaps – or, here in this church hall, I wondered whether it was the need for self-sacrifice so lacking in an increasingly Godless and childfree society.
I gave them another nudge. ‘I mean, we all know voting makes no difference, right?’
‘That’s the problem with democracy!’ chuffed my neighbour, sparkling eyes set in an affable face. ‘China lifted billions out of poverty with an iron rod. OK, so a few people got crushed along the way. That’s why we need a figurehead to bring us together, someone with oomph, with charisma.’
A woman, serious: ‘Well, we’ve got Chris Packham.’
Like Chris Packham, they seemed like well-meaning people. Yes, there were a lot of Birkenstocks in the room – there was an element of the fringe, for sure – but there were also a lot of normal people. They were just terrified. The fact that they’re only stopping traffic and throwing paint, I thought, was a testament to how nice they are.
Yes, they were nice enough. But you know who else was ‘nice enough’? The you-know-whos; the ordinary, decent people of you-know-where in you-know-when, driven mad by hysteria, who herded their neighbours into you-know-whats with all the ordinariness of packing groceries.
No, something didn’t quite sit right with me. All evening, the speakers had promoted non-violent action. Non-violent this, non-violent that, over and over again. Why? Everything one does is non-violent, it’s just assumed. When my wife announces she’s going to feed the ducks, I don’t check, ‘Non-violently I hope?’
There is a shadow lurking behind that word, non-violent, something looming at the back of the mind, something that must be insisted against. They might as well be saying, ‘non-violent… for now’. If they have no qualms putting themselves in harm’s way – lying in traffic and goading people – then what’s to stop them from putting other people, my family, in harm’s way too? At what point does the end not justify the means for them?
Evil, as Hannah Arendt put it, is banal.
As I was getting up to leave, an elderly woman pottered over and offered me a cucumber she’d grown in her allotment. It was a lot like the people there: green, earnest, and slightly misshapen.
I left it behind.