Reverend Billy’s Revelations

Dear Reverend — I’m suffering from environmental anxiety. I only use that word because I saw it online. Environmental anxiety. I’m 16 years old. I see it in my younger sister too. Is there any hope?

— RICK, Bay Ridge

Dear Rick,
We’re all asking the same question.

Our “Stop Shopping Choir” is on our way to COP26 in Glasgow and now you read that the oilmen and the bankers will insist that they need to drill and burn for a few more years. What?

So what can we do? The 26th international conversation shows us an arrangement of people having one super-conversation about climate. You have hundreds of thousands of people coming to this city and in the middle is a small private conversation by the oilmen and nation states … And that’s in a building that is no-access.

Hundreds of thousands are parading and dancing, singing and puppeteering and standing up on benches and shouting. It’s like the old and the new in a shape of a donut. The hole of the donut is old people who can’t change, and they are killers. The huge crowd on the outside is busy making new culture, new ways of living. We are creative, and we are nonviolent, and that gives us the advantage.

The oilmen and the soldiers that protect them are exactly like a prison. The criminals are surrounded by armed guards. They are there only because they believe that the courts and politicians are corrupted enough so that they can be trusted to carry out the fossil policy for another year, until COP27.

But wait a minute. We are creative enough to have a better idea. Start with the banning of these meetings. There is no COP27. Don’t let them give their marketing officials something to lie about. Let’s start now; loving talk and loving listening, including with those who uphold the old order, will open the walls of the no-access zone.

The world is dancing and singing in the windows of the power guys. We’re dancing and singing because we love life, but it’s not just a song and a dance.
— REV BILLY

REVEREND BILLY TALEN IS THE PASTOR OF THE CHURCH OF STOP SHOPPING. HAVE A QUESTION FOR THE REVEREND? EMAIL REVBILLY@REVBILLY.COM AND UNBURDEN YOUR SOUL.