re: #59 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

When young people today are diagnosed with “climate anxiety” I suspect the cause is not really about “climate”, but the anxiety comes from over-stimulation of the doom type. Almost every form of entertainment about the future is dystopian.

As somebody with a lot of under-30s connections…no.

Kids are anxious because the bad news is inescapable and they’re incapable of reconciling the contradictions of their lives between how they’re insistently told the world works and how the world observably works.

We’ve raised a bunch of kids with constant access to unlimited information in ways that make the old American cultural norm of aggressive ignorance about the rest of the world impossible. What old people think of as realpolitik is largely just being acclimated that when people suffer and die elsewhere it doesn’t connect up, it doesn’t signify anything, allowing them to simultaneously express universalist, liberal moral schemes and teach them to their kids and not-think about how existing material conditions demonstrate that nothing they say matters.

And this is precisely the case with climate change: it’s not the doom-saying, it’s the process of being told how things work and then watching them not-work, for your entire life.

Furthermore, we should probably talk about the derivative trauma of most young people living entirely inside The War On Terror, with it’s routinization of watching people exploded with missiles while adding color commentary, it’s maimed and traumatized soldiers, and it’s own demonstration between the gulf of “what is said to be the objective” and “what actually happens.” If nothing else, about half the country…and it’s not a partisan split…has been teaching their kids to be constantly scared of strangers and foreigners. The long bloody tail of the war…which literally concluded with a little brass bull of Afghan children in a van…is just an unavoidable demonstration of that life is cheap for existing institutions.

The people in their twenties and early thirties are the generation of school shootings, and have literally grown up watching adults fail to follow-through on protecting them, over time actually become resigned to being able to do little more than repost that one Onion headline. Institutional failure and indifference is their norm, and at some point the wish casting of “we would do stuff if not for Republicans” is eroded by the contradictory demand for “reaching across the aisle to get things done.”

The condescension that kids don’t know stuff is literally adults convincing themselves that their callousness is wisdom, which might be a workable position if it weren’t so demonstrable that nothing’s been learned.

The house fire is already going, and promising that everything can go back to normal doesn’t work on people who never know a “normal” that wasn’t watching the conditions that guaranteed a house fire be ignored.

You can’t fix this by declaring everyone else stupid and unrealistic precisely because the last twenty years involve all supporters of the status quo just plain denying how bad things are. This the legacy of half-hearted gesture-heavy politics while simultaneously talking down to people that want real change; this is invoking “realism” while refusing to acknowledge how aggressively undemocratic your opposite party has become, directly resulting in a series of own-goals that have created the rise of fascism.

Which is shaping up to be the next big letdown, because for some reason the center-left has hopped on the “let’s expand state surveillance activity and also make excuses for cop violence” bandwagon at the exact same time they’re talking about how bad it will be under President Trump.