"When I look at this awful trainwreck of a world we’re leaving to younger generations it infuriates me that older generations are constantly bitching at them. How can we have any attitude toward the young but total bare-hearted contrition? We should be on our knees begging them to forgive us for having failed them so spectacularly, but instead we’ve got the gall to wag our fingers at them and lecture them about pronouns and TikTok.

“Hurr, durr, they look at their smartphones too much and they don’t know how to change a tire and they use they/them pronouns!” Shut up you fucking wanker. You burnt up their biosphere you piece of shit. You’re tossing them from the womb into a dying world of war and chaos and injustice and exploitation and you have the temerity to tell them they’re doing it wrong? Fuck you.

I hope they ignore us, personally. I hope they keep rewriting the rules of this dogshit society we’re leaving them and knocking down every pillar of our culture. Everything we older generations have done has taken our world to the brink of environmental collapse and nuclear brinkmanship, so I hope they keep shrugging off the old rules of this profoundly sick civilization and trying new things and blazing new trails in the hope of steering clear of the disaster we placed on their horizon.

We shouldn’t be mocking and lecturing them, we should be humbly apologizing and trying to learn from them and help them. We are failures. They are humanity’s last and only hope.

To the young: I am so, so sorry, from the very bottom of my heart. I hope you succeed in clawing your way out of the madness your predecessors left you in and create a healthy world, a healthy world which will look nothing like the one we made for you. I am on your side, whatever you need."

Caitlin Johnstone
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/

#world #biosphere #war #ecocide #genocide #politics