Our leaders are collaborators with fossil fuel colonialists. This is the source of our communal dread. The lassitude that distinguishes our moment is born of sorrow and buried rage. We act like colonial subjects because, in effect, that’s what we are. Guardian Tim Winton 29 Sept 2024 “Kids these days are such snowflakes! So flaccid and self-involved, so doomy and anxious. If it’s not the drugs, it’s the screen time, right? I mean, what’s their problem?” I try to sidestep conversations like these. Engaging saps so much time and energy. But avoiding them leaves me feeling dirty. Not because I’ve forgone an opportunity to win an argument, but because I know I’ve failed to defend those who need and deserve my solidarity. The awkward truth is that the mature-aged complainers offering such judgments are not imagining things. The dejection of young people is palpable. But the mistake many of their elders make is assuming that every instance of slumped posture and downcast mien is an expression of choice, a pose being struck for social effect, because, often as not, what they’re observing is a logical response to the world around them and their prospects within it. This is a form of communal anguish.
If it seems more evident in young people it may be because they have fewer layers of insulation and camouflage. The corrosive burn of their distress is not as easily dampened by the comforts and diversions that blind their elders.
A 2020 survey in the UK found that 70% of 18- to 24-year-olds reported experiencing helplessness, anger, insomnia, panic and guilt about climate breakdown. So, yes, younger people are being noticed but they’re not really being seen. And their situation, as inheritors of the whirlwind, is not being acknowledged. This is a form of communal anguish. If it seems more evident in young people it may be because they have fewer layers of insulation and camouflage. The corrosive burn of their distress is not as easily dampened by the comforts and diversions that blind their elders.
A 2020 survey in the UK found that 70% of 18- to 24-year-olds reported experiencing helplessness, anger, insomnia, panic and guilt about climate breakdown. So, yes, younger people are being noticed but they’re not really being seen. And their situation, as inheritors of the whirlwind, is not being acknowledged. These kids have arrived at an uncanny moment, for the ground underfoot feels unsafe. The air they breathe is suspect and the people they should be able to rely upon to act in their best interests have demonstrated time and again they cannot be trusted. The certainties enjoyed by previous generations are so far from reach as to be cruelly mythical.I think it’s the duty of older citizens to face this. The most stupid thing we can do right now is to persist in the lie we tell ourselves – that their sense of feeling forsaken has nothing to do with us. The name for what ails us has been a matter of debate for years – “climate anxiety”, “eco-grief”, “solastalgia” – but none of these labels sound strong enough to capture the enervating creep of loss and dread that torments so many.What prosperous, educated westerners are experiencing is a form of paralysis, a shutting down and closing off.
Frantz Fanon described something similar in Algeria in the 1950s when he observed “the tense immobility of the dominated society”. For all their deluded airs of respectability and legitimacy, our leaders are largely agents of desolation. While in the grip of a global emergency where tribulations are being visited upon the poorest, few of our leaders inspire the hope and solidarity that could help fight, endure and survive. Liberation doesn’t interest them. Many are devoted servants of the status quo. Which is a polite way of saying they’re collaborators.......read on https://www.theguardian.com/