As well as tidying up my digital identity, I’ve also been fossicking through my files, dropping photos into a photo manager, and generally decluttering my hard drives.
During my system spelunking, I found an essay I wrote in January 2020 which never found a home.
lI think it still makes sense. Hopefully. I was trying to capture my deep disappointment in, and the cognitive dissonance Millennials are experiencing about, the world promised by Boomers and the realities of world we are inheriting.
Remember, this was written pre-covid at the tail end of Trump’s presidency, during a massive bushfire season in Australia, and at the height of School Strike 4 Climate.
2024 JJW will pipe back up at the end, see you then.
A Komposita of feelings
The primary school I went to seemed dead set on indoctrinating us kids born in the 80s to believe we would be the ones who would save things. The deep exhale of the end of the Cold War must have been filling the sails of the pinko pedagogues at my primary. We exhaled along with our socialist supervisors, singing songs which encouraged us to speak truth to power because “we are the ones who’ll inherit the Earth”.
A verse from this song reads
We have to live with the values you offer
And we have to deal with the mess that you leave
What good is wealth to us kids of tomorrow
If we can’t even trust in the air that we breathe?
The song was originally composed by David Anthony Clark and you can listen to a reggae/dub(?) version of the song here.
I look back on this now and laugh. Twenty-five years of being told to shut up, the same generation which incited us to sing that song is serving up the same old shitty values, making the same shitty mess. I don’t know if you’ve looked outside recently, but the air is hazy with the smoke of bush fires and the burnt-up dreams of Millennials who will never be able to affect change without committing mass murder of Boomers.
Perhaps Greta Thunberg should have owned the mistranslation about putting people against the wall1. The argument for dusting off Robespierre’s playbook in order to not only salvage our self-esteem, but the planet, is becoming more and more compelling. “OK Boomer” would spur fewer angry editorials from rich privileged 69-year-old white men and associated fawning comments from selfish chardonnay-swilling retired housewives if it was delivered while holding the release cord of a guillotine.
That was a joke. I promise. To any ‘intelligence’ officers reading this, don’t bother putting me on any lists. I lack the follow-through to be able to actually lead a revolution, let along assemble a gibbet. I stopped buying things from Ikea not only because of the negative environmental impact, but because the instructions do my head in.
But people are angry. Young people are angry. This anger is largely unchanneled. Or it goes into crafting cynical Tweets or copy/paste memes about suicide. Or actual suicide. The prospect of which, once again, is becoming more and more compelling. This generational depression has a lot to do with the cognitive dissonance experienced over the past 30 years where kids of the West were promised a brighter future by Boomers, only to have that future turn into a boring dystopia where we aren’t listened to, control no capital, and see the planet dying.
My first realisation old people weren’t going to listen to me was in my last couple of years at high school. I had a pretty rough run of it. Between the hormones, social scuffles, and a dementia-ridden grandfather I struggled with depression. Teachers wrote shit like “intelligent kid, needs to apply himself more” in report cards2. Despite all this, I somehow had enough mental wherewithal to get into the speech finals.
I had recently visited Waitangi, and the disconnect I had between what was taught in school about Pākehā / Māori relations (literally nothing, but hey I can still remember a bunch about Tudor and Stuart England), my social understanding of race relations (New Zealand was a harmonious multi-cultural land of peace and love) and, you know, the actual reality (murder, colonial occupation, invasion and a lasting legacy of inequality) blew my fluoxetine drenched brain. Perfect topic for a speech, right?
Wrong.
I don’t remember the actual content of the speech, but the gist was the tame call for understanding. That other people might have a different point of view and rather than listening to Don Brash — at the time a nascent white supremacist zombie who had taken over the major right-wing political party of New Zealand by giving speeches to other ailing boomers whose brains were seeping into the carpet of Rotary clubs around the country — we might take a more compassionate approach, like those songs we used to sing at primary school.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I also don’t remember the actual reaction to the speech. I don’t think I actually got booed. But Bad Vibes™ were emanating from the crowd. Angry looks and murmurs from the assembled parents made it clear this topic was off limits. Fair enough. What does a depressed 17-year-old know?
This set-up has been re-enacted millions of times since then. Young person says something challenging the orthodoxy of the old elite and they’re shut down. The clearest and most farcical example of this is the billionaire President of the United States’ Twitter war with Thunberg. It gives me hope to see Trump is losing to a 16-year-old girl, but it also terrifies me this is still happening when the catastrophic consequences of not listening to the few people under 40 who can still be bothered to speak up are becoming more and more apparent.
So, if we have been the test case of wide-spread class-based gaslighting and generational Pavlovian Conditioning — lacking the financial means to break the boomers electro-shock collar — what will the revolution look like?
Fuck knows.
But I see a revolution of dissonance. A revolution led by the Greta’s of the world, with a bunch of neurotic 80s kids as their Red Guard. Posting. Protesting. Protecting.
Why can’t we lead it? Because even putting pen to paper for this essay is terrifying. A weird range of emotions are washing over me. Frustration. Guilt. Imposter syndrome. Anger. Other emotions which only German Komposita can describe. It is tiring. It is soul destroying. Listening to the students speak at the Climate Strike, they’re still unfettered by deep cynicism and emotion us slightly older adults have.
Pair these Big Feels with a political system which has devolved into the worst episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? ever — everything is made up and the facts don’t matter — and it seems like we need a new paradigm for action. Without an immediate in your face existential threat like the Vietnam War, Mutually Assured Destruction or Apartheid the practice of protest has lost to the sands of pre-Internet time. The conditions of anodyne consumer capitalism have wiped the slate clean and we will need to improvise.
That improvisation and learning is becoming IRL (In Real Life. Get with the lingo). Here in Australia the first tentative steps to organising outside of the classic campus communist canon are going well. The Climate Strike protests in late 2019 drew record crowds, shut down major cities, and jerked parents and grandparents into some kind of pre-awareness state that something was wrong. With bush fires still burning, and the Prime Minister burying his head deeper and deeper into the ash. Even Gen X are starting to give a fuck.
The big issue about the revolution is who is going to pay for it. In this sense the biggest enemy to the revolution are the ‘Ahhhh actually…’ tutting wonks who still believe compromise in politics is possible. The same people who are wedded to terms like ‘fiscal prudence’ and being able to back up your policies with economics.
I’m going to let you into a little secret: economics is a scam.
At about the time I was being born, a bunch people, who closely resembled the Multi-Level Marketing grifters of today, started shopping around the idea that handing over control of economies to a fictional character in the first known example of Fifty Shades of Grey fan-fiction — the Free Market — was the best way forward.
If you look around this has had mixed results. It’s great I can now buy margarine without a prescription. It’s bad because people are, in real terms, worse off than they were 30 years ago of most social and health indicators oh and we’re on fire and the Great Barrier Reef is dead. That line from the song I mentioned earlier, “what good is wealth to us kids of tomorrow”, keeps on running through my head.
Perhaps the best thing right-wingers have done was to throw out the mythical rule book of politics. By lying to us about economics, climate change, and that they would come home they just needed to pop out for a pack of ciggies, it means we can unshackle from the terrible style of high school debate wonks are wedded to. For so long they’ve peddled fear instead of facts. But now the things young people are afraid of aren’t losing their jobs (they don’t have decent ones) or house prices (too much smashed avo) it is literal annihilation. Which has left a gap in the market for something that pop culture tells me is so much more powerful than fear: love.
And really The Beatles had it right. We have created these complex systems which just cause frustration and pain. Then because we’re human and have egos and pride and all those feelings based on some hard-wired instinct which stop us from backing down, we create more frustration and pain.
In retrospect, “OK Boomer” might be more powerful if it was accompanied by a big hug. People are so fucking angry, which is why the polite patronising nature of the phrase is so powerful. It’s a calm response in the face of actual insanity.
In the end, mass suicide is too self-indulgent. Mass murder too messy. Mass sitting around on our asses waiting for the elderly rich to die too boring. We will inherit the earth, and it’s not going to be good shape. But perhaps, just perhaps, us kids of the twenty-first century can be the ones to save it.
Contemporary JJW back again
A couple of thoughts.
Covid done fucked us up. I can no longer see the glimmer of hope I saw when writing this just 4 years ago. Four years. It feels like an eternity.
There is still the anger, and it’s still largely unchanneled, but Climate Strikes have fuzzed out. Greta’s gone quiet. We haven’t transitioned to renewables. AI is accelerating the soupification of our brains and climate. Oh and we’ve got a couple of wars and genocides raging. So that’s all cool and normal and good. No nukes yet, which is positive.
The Boomers who maybe had started to wake up to the mess they’ve created have become cookers after lockdowns, are still ranting about vaccines, and their brain worm riddled bodies are marching back to polling booths to vote Trump back in so he can take another red hot shot at fascism in the USA.
I’m trying to love, but there’s not much to love at the moment.
Thinking about all these issues is a huge bummer. But we need to be thinking about them, talking about them, reminding each other we can take small actions, we’re not going insane and, in this moment, we are (hopefully) okay3.
Stay safe, stay sane
<3
JJW
- Her full quote reads: “World leaders are still trying to run away from their responsibilities, but we have to make sure they cannot do that… We will make sure that we put them against the wall, and they will have to do their job to protect our futures.” Which to me, sounds threatening but not revolutionarily murderous. ↩︎
- My parents still have these report cards so I can verify this. ↩︎
- If you’re not, that is okay too! Please shout out if you’re not, always here for a chat. ↩︎
