When you watch as your home get washed away by rising seas, the waters inching higher every year;

when you breathe in air thick with smoke, orange hazy skies above you, as wildfires rage reducing your whole life to ash;

when you wake up to floods rocketing water down the streets, parts of your home floating past;

when you suffer through heat waves so hot the asphalt burns the bottoms of your feet in november,

when paramedics go from houses to house in your neighborhood treating heatstroke because air conditioning is a luxury, and your little kids watch as their family is put on stretchers, and you have to watch their faces while they grapple with what’s happening;

when you can feel your culture and traditions slip away as your sons and daughters ask “but why can’t we?”;

when you watch your crops shrivel while looking up at a sky that refuses to rain, the land you poured your life into turning to dust;

when you watch corporations and governments promise to change but continue to drill, burn, and pollute, valuing profit over people, convenience over safety;

when you march in the streets, your voice horse from chanting, your colorful signs ignored, and your future dismissed; when you lose faith in a system that refuses to change, realizing no matter how loud you scream, the world refuses to listen;

when you’re a new parent wondering if your baby will know a world where winters are cold and icicles hang from houses, where oceans are full of reefs with flashy fish, where redwood forests still stand and trees reach up to the skies

–then you will understand why we need more than empty promises.