Greta, Please Forgive this Gaza Late Adopter

Lowell Bliss June 5, 2025

Dear Greta Thunberg,

First, let me confess how much I have used you. My go-to name dropping is that moment during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 when Karenna Gore welcomes me into a room, turns to her father, the former Vice President of the United States, and says, “Lowell was in the new Greta Thunberg documentary.”

It is true that I had a cameo in your 2020 film, I Am Greta. My go-to name dropper of a joke is that I had more lines in it than Arnold Schwarzenegger or Pope Francis. But then I subjected myself to a little thought exercise. I tried to imagine you watching a screening of the film in 2020. You would have remembered COP24 in Katowice, Poland in 2018, but you would not have remembered me and our encounter there. Instead, in 2020, as you watched the film, my face on the screen would have simply been one of the first meetings with an adult which, when strung together, become a major theme of the film: adults are quick to praise you, want to associate themselves with you, but rarely (or slowly) take action on the evil and injustice that you seem to see so clearly. I wrote up my thought exercise in a blog post: “Greta and I: Confessions of a 15-Second Cameo.”

Now you are on a boat, the Madleen, in the Mediterranean on your way to Gaza, carrying humanitarian aid to a population starving under a 90-day blockade. The Live Tracker says you will arrive on Saturday. On the Instagram clips that I watch before bedtime, you admit that you and your 11 fellows are engaging in messaging not relief work—that your trip, or the seizure of the Madleen, the sinking of the Madleen, even your death, should it come to those things, will mean more for Gaza than the flour and rice that you are carrying in your hold. Commentators pester you with questions: “Why have you abandoned your climate change platform?” No, you tell them, I’ve been given a platform, and it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t use it for the tens of thousands who are dead, the hundreds of thousands who are injured, the approximately 2 million who have been displaced, and the millions facing starvation under this blockade and its attacks on aide stations.

My father-in-law was in a church in Islamabad, Pakistan that was attacked by terrorists. They came right into the worship service, threw five grenades, and killed five people. I know some of the secondhand horror of the October 7th Hamas attack, but what I lack are the epigenetics of the Jewish people, the deep vigilance wondering where safety might be, and whether the rest of the world will reliably affirm their right to exist or come to their defense this time. You are a Swedish citizen; I am a dual citizen of the US and Canada. We both come from privilege. We both have our national heroes: Raoul Wallenberg rescuing Jews, Dwight Eisenhower liberating Dachau. Did you and your dad do at COP24 what some Episcopalian colleagues and I did the day after I met you: namely, take a day off and visit Auschwitz? That one moment, in the middle of a climate summit, did more than anything to instruct me that evil is evil, injustice is injustice, genocide is genocide, the slaughter of children brooks no justification. To label oneself as a “climate activist” is a ruse, a means of picking up some good name-dropping stories, unless of course, you can scratch the climate activist and find a justice activist, a compassion activist, a love activist, or as I long to be: a Christ-following activist. I’ve spent a lot of time in my climate activism talking about Bangladeshi children; I’ve spent a lot of time in my interest in the Holocaust talking about Jewish children; I feel like I’m late in joining you in publicly talking about Palestinian children, and this makes me feel sad and ashamed.

I’ve been thinking about the Diffusion of Innovation model lately. Apparently 2.5% of people are “Innovators” of an idea, product, or movement. You, for example, didn’t take more than a few days before donning a keffiyeh. In the States, it seemed like Christian leader Lisa Sharon Harper was on the first plane to the West Bank. My wife and I did many tangible “Early Adopters” sort of things, but I think I was mostly an “Early Emoter.” I woke up this morning feeling like I’m at least part of the “Early Majority” (39 percent of the population.) I do intend to get this statement posted on Substack and Facebook by the end of the day, and certainly before you arrive on the coast of Gaza. I come from countries and institutions who have been slow to take action (if any), who are aware of their own risk aversion regarding public support for Palestine, and who yet don’t want to come to the end of a genocide “having sat this one out.” Canada has been better than the U.S., and I often wonder if the educated Canadian public isn’t still haunted by Gen. Roméo Dallaire’s book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Dallaire was in charge of UN Peacekeepers during the 1994 genocide. For that matter, former Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson is considered the “father of modern peacekeeping.” As a diplomat he proposed the deployment of an impartial force to help resolve the Suez Crisis of 1956. See! There is precedent for “not sitting this one out” and in fact, for acting on the slogan, “Never Again.”

At least I’m part of the “Early Majority,” because one of my greatest fears is to be among the 16% who are labelled “Laggards.” Laggards eventually come around but often only after history has played its course. And Christians in particular are notorious for revisionist self-esteem. We claim Corrie ten Boom as a hero for keeping Jews in “the hiding place” in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and for enduring Ravensbrück after her arrest. We imagine ourselves doing the same, but the research of David Gushee says otherwise: European Christians who rescued Jews—in big ways or small, direct or indirect—were the tiniest of percentages. I also saw my old friend Rich Cizik during COP24 in Poland. This was years after he had been let go by the National Association of Evangelicals, years after Bill Moyers had interviewed him and asked why as an Evangelical, he was getting involved in climate action. I remember him now because of his answer to Moyers’s question: “You think you’re staying true to the Bible?” Rich responded:

Well, I believe so. Look, there were people who said, “Stay true to the Bible,” in the battle over abolition and slavery in America. And both sides said I appeal to the Bible. Was one side right and one side wrong? Of course. Why? Because at times we allow our political judgments to get ahead of our Biblical value systems. We do that. It happened in the civil rights movement of the 1960s in which evangelical Christians sat on their hands. And I’ve had to apologize, you see, for you see those evangelicals who sat on their hands then. And today, Mr. Moyers, I am not willing to make that same mistake.

The legal studies are already issuing their conclusions: what continues to happen in Palestine meets the legal standards of apartheid, a recognized crime against humanity; what is happening in Gaza meets the legal standards of genocide, a recognized crime against humanity. History will see it and say it. The Laggards will see it and say it. I told a work colleague last February: “When my biography gets written, I don’t want it to say that he died a coward, that he never spoke up, that he was too afraid of taking public risks. If they say he was late, they will say at least he showed up.”

This morning my wife asked me what had changed recently for me regarding Gaza. The first thing I told her was that the algorithms in my Instagram and Apple News feeds seem to suggest that the tide is turning, and that an Early Majority is forming in support ending the genocide in Gaza. While I admit there are some “safety in numbers”—look what Harvard is able to do as compared to Columbia—I also had a fear that I would delay so long as to slip into late majority and laggardness. But Robynn said that she thinks that the tide has yet to turn, given the slowness of many governments to respond. She said that the mistaken signals are from my algorithms; that in fact, my “Early Emoting” had trained my algorithms enough to keep Gaza on my heart; that in fact—alas for a quick end to genocide in Gaza—I too might be considered an “Early Adopter.” And so, Greta, you can see that I am using you once again—pretending to write a letter to you but actually using my platform to address my readers. We can all be “early adopters,” but only, if like Greta, we choose to use the platforms that we’ve been given to speak out NOW. The only problem in referencing the Diffusion of Innovation Model is that it is a bell curve, and so is the slow starvation caused by the aid blockade against Gaza. Compassion and justice demands that we don’t ride this curve. We need to smash it, NOW. I invite you to choose your own “Early Adopter” action. The actual Madleen has set sail. What action can be your Madleen? Each of our responses will look different.

The second reason I told Robynn why I thought Gaza had recently changed for me is a stranger one. Over the weekend, while she was gone on a retreat, I re-watched Schindler’s List. I wanted to see if I could hold Palestinians in the emotional and moral arc of the movie at the same time as I held the Jews depicted in the film. Could I hold both Nazi commandant Amon Göth and Benjamin Netanyahu as indicted war criminals? Could I hold Oskar Schindler and myself, both his set of foibles and aspirations and my sets, both his historical crisis and mine?

Turns out: you can. So, I shall.

I’m grateful to you, Greta. Though we only meet now in my self-examinations, you are an important part of my moral formation. Thank you.

You are very dear to God,

Lowell Bliss