Fridays for Future

Inspired by the movement that was started by Greta Thunberg, adults responded in solidarity with their children in an act of reconciliation and to make reparations for the harms they had inflicted on the earth by building and maintaining the hierarchical corporate and governance structures. Only the few benefited from a global social, economic, and political system designed to convince humans that they were powerless individuals who must serve the empire of selfishness, greed, and hubris with their labour.

On Mother’s Day, the world remembered Mother Earth, who gave them life. Mother Earth declared, “Let my children go. Free every living creature from the dominion of man.”

In one voice the people reasserted their agency, capacity, and authority over their time, energy, and resources as a powerful collective of human beings by organizing a strike that turned the five-day work week into a four-day work week.

From that day on, Fridays were the day that employees were paid in full for their day’s work, but it was spent doing the work that they should have been doing all along to regenerate the earth. Since corporations and governments had failed to follow through on their promises, the loss of faith in these institutions was turned into a day to imagine, design, and build the future together, to accelerate the transition to a world of truth, justice, and reconciliation.

Every Friday, the world held these archaic colonial, exploitative, and genocidal systems to account, and revoked their acceptance of the control and domination of the corporations and governments they had inherited, designed by imperial and colonial empires to benefit only the famous, the rich, and the powerful. Instead, people spent the day caring for each other, doing acts of kindness, generosity, and compassion for those who had been least served by the systems of separation, domination, entropy, and death.

When they realized that the world was healthier and more peaceful for stopping the relentless drive for extraction, growth, and profit, they replaced the obsolete systems of oppression, slavery, and death with a way of living that was in reciprocity, symbiosis, and synergy with people, animals, plants, and minerals—with the whole of the living earth.

That Mother’s Day was remembered as the beginning of the era of the regeneration of Mother Earth: the regen•era.

Thanks to Jane McGonigal for the prompt to imagine the unimaginable in her book, Imaginable.