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Björn Wiman: the Passage of power is strong – but we have the power to turn the

Bebisbubblan, the hours in the bebisbubblan. It is not what christmas is really about? Those first magical days when a new human being has come to earth – the s

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Björn Wiman: the Passage of power is strong – but we have the power to turn the

Bebisbubblan, the hours in the bebisbubblan. It is not what christmas is really about? Those first magical days when a new human being has come to earth – the smells, the stillness around the sleeping little attached, the external reverence and respect for a new life. A child is born on this day.

It is the spirit of christmas urscen – so that the be varied from the kitschigaste krubborna to the empire's most staggering highlights. But there are also moments before and after this encapsulated moment. One of the most original gestaltningarna of the prelude to the birth are available in Pieter Bruegels painting ”the Census at Bethlehem” from 1566, where the flemish master, with the same obviousness as kurbitsmålarna from the Valleys, allowing the Bible story to take place in his native place and the present. This is unfolding thus christianity's greatest moment came in the middle of the rich street life in one of the Flemish villages: a crowd roaring and crowd around a building with the hapsburg double-ended eagle, someone cut the throat of a pig and a man let his water against a wall. Only as a minor character in the middle of this flux, a pregnant woman riding on a donkey, led by her husband.

The most eye-catching however, the picture is the ground. It is covered by snow. ”The census in Bethlehem” is included in the series of paintings such as Pieter Bruegel created in the beginning of the so-called Little ice age, a period of extreme weather in Europe that began in the 1560s, when the rivers and canals in Flanders, froze in the winter. It is a completely new world, he depicts, in a milky, a bit dull winter light with a red sun as it descends like a portent in the background. Winter has come to the world.

have been the usual unusually cold – it was then that Viktor Rydberg wrote his poem ”the Plot”, often fnissad as obsolete pekoral or ridiculous barnkammarrim.

Nothing could be more wrong. In a fine article in Expressen a few years ago, the author Jesper Högström forward the ”Plot” as a poignant depiction of a melancholic outsider, who resigned themselves to consider the world he is shut out from. The most striking scene takes place when the poem's protagonist paws into the nursery and look at the husbondsfolkets sleeping little children – the children he knows that he himself will never receive: ”No, let it förtycka, it is his greatest happiness.”

unlike previous generations, we have all the power and all the knowledge we need in order to control the passage of current in the right direction.

more than came Viktor Rydberg himself never your luck in the bebisbubblan. His own marriage remained childless, and life through the bar with him memories of a childhood in abject poverty, with a mother who died when he was five years old, and a father who drank down. Rydberg utackorderades as a foster child, and after a great fire in our hometown, Jönköping was found he at the age of seven ”on the street alone stray”. He had thought that the earth was struck by a comet and were about to go under.

go together, now as then. The last few weeks, I'm fascinated with followed Aftonbladet reportageserie ”Their planet”, where journalists Erik Wiman and Magnus Wennman has traveled to a number of klimatutsatta places on earth, and visited a family with a very young child – the child to grow up in a world that is now starting to speak out in the form of forest fires, droughts and floods.

the Stories takes its starting point in Magnus Wennmans images of sleeping children, whose small bodies and he projected the specific images from their birthplaces – a drastic and superb shaping of the modern world, global manger. Little Lincoln from the town of Paradise in California are born in the midst of a forest fire that transformed the city into a burning inferno worse than Bruegels worst helvetesskildringar, when the mother Rachelle is forced to flee from the hospital in the middle of the flames with her newborn son in her arms. In Bhola in Bangladesh, one of the countries that are currently most affected by climate change, there is a seven days little girl who has not yet received any name. Her family lives in an attached, but as yet unknown, distance to disaster. ”The sea and the sea eats and our time here is finite,” says her dad.

after that give their children in the next generation a better world. It is the starting point for the expectant parents in skogsbrändernas the united states and those of Bangladesh, it is the starting point for the melankoliske enslingen in Viktor Rydberg's poem and for the adults as seeing their little ones play snowball fight on Pieter Bruegels images from the 1500's. Somewhere in the frozen midvinternatten think Viktor Rydberg's brownie hear ”the passage of power” and wonder, ”wherever it shall go”. He does not want to think of comets that threaten to destroy our civilization, he just wants to look at the sleeping children, in the belief that they will prosper and grow old and be followed by a new generation. He – like most people – want to listen to the sound from the passage of power, in the knowledge that it will never cease, and that our future existence is secured.

the Passage of power is strong – but its movement is not a foregone conclusion. Where is it going? Unlike previous generations, we have all the power and all the knowledge we need to steer it in the right direction.

Merry christmas!

Read more by Björn Wimans chronicles of the climate crisis – and about the book ”Late on earth. 33 thoughts on the world's biggest news” .

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