Exstinction Rebillion Hits Berlin

So while the plane was in the process of landing at Tiegel Airport Berlin I was jostled awake and as I was getting my baring's I ended up listening to these guys, sitting next to me, trading business cards and talking about an oil convention that they were attending in Berlin. They also mentioned that there was going to be a "Big" protest by the Extinction Rebellion protesters. This peaked my interest since Washington DC was invaded by these people (or a group loosely affiliated with this group) literally two weeks ago prior to my trip to Berlin. So in the back of my head I thought this has the potential of being something interesting to see. As I was walking around the city on day two of my Germany adventure I came across the Extinction Rebellion in Tiergarten (which is a huge park in the center of Berlin) near the Reichstag. These protesters are basically people who are protesting Climate Change and will interrupt traffic and close down subway stations to "Get there point across". Which I am sure helps and hurts there cause all at the same time.

As I moved within the massive staging area I noticed they created a camp ground in which they created rows and rows of tents. They more or less created a little city where everyone seems to be living communally. They had huge tents where they were having "workshops" and other tents where people appeared to be "praying" in circles. The deeper I got into this tent city the weirder it got, you started to see the anti capitalist posters and banners deep with in the tent city. That is sort of when I realized this was more then just a Climate Change protests. This is the same protest I have been witnessing for the past twenty years but in a different name. I always sort of wondered what happened to the IMF Protesters of the late 1990's and early 2000's who thought the IMF was the worst thing on the planet. These guys then morphed into the Occupy Wall Street protesters of the late 2009 to 2012 period. Now they have embedded themselves into the climate change protesters. I guess Extinction Rebellion needs anyone who is disgruntled to be apart of there cause. A sorts of, "Hey its 2019. We will take who we can get" mentality. I mean you had all the typical players. You had devil stick guy, you had hula hoop people in all different types of colored hair. The only thing I did not see was the hacky sack circle (to which I was disappointed because I totally would have joined in on that). It was a mish mash of old and young within this crowd of people. But a lot of these protesters seemed sort of lost to me. People who are lost who are looking for the "great movement" to be apart of and to help them find meaning to there lives. Those were the majority of what I saw but obviously not all.

I ran into these protesters later in the week when they closed down a street and took over a subway station. They handed me some leaflets but they were all in German so I had no idea what it might have said.