As we endure the bratty antics of scowling ignoramus Greta Thunberg and her idiot parade of “climate-striking” infants, it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that the younger generation is going to hell in a handcart. That’s nothing new: oldies have been grumbling about the “youth of today” ever since Plato got his toga in a twist about the feckless Athenian delinquents of his day.
But, there are a few signs that not all is lost. A recent “teens react” YouTube video showed that some teenagers still believe in free speech. An essay by a recent high school graduate, Melbourne’s Joanne Tran, shows that not all youngsters are falling for the millenarian campaign of eco-catastrophe, either.
I graduated high school recently from what has been an insane year of engaging in political shenanigans. I’ve come to realise that my classmates’ decision to skip school to join the climate strike and their disgust and shock at this year’s federal election results, are symptoms of a wider phenomenon — that of deep pessimism and anxiety my generation has about our future, despite evidence proving otherwise.
It’s painfully obvious, listening to them, just how little these little league misanthropes actually know. Almost every utterance is a parroted phrase. Pressed to actually explain themselves, they invariably dig deeper into their stock of platitudes before, as often as not, simply walking away.
It is evident that the unprecedented levels of hysteria about our future are being projected by the media, certain groups and schools. This is reflected in encouragement to skip a day of our education to “save the planet”, to filling our heads with the repetition of stock-standard platitudes such as “the system is broken and we need the government to save us” and “you are living worse off than your parents’ generation”.
Sadly, it seems that the division of hysteria sells, but optimism and facts do not.
As Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist showed, almost every talking-point of what he calls “the litany” is either grossly exaggerated or is outright fabricated. Things aren’t perfect (and they never will be), but many of them are better than they have been in a very long time; some of them better than ever before in history.
Objectively, the world is getting better, not worse. The World Bank has reported that over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty and that global poverty rates have never been lower in recorded history.
Access to education has never been greater as global literacy rates continue to increase with more women and children being given the right to an education.
Modern medicine has also never been more advanced with mortality rates from preventable illnesses at an all-time low, and many diseases largely eradicated due to technological advancement.
All of this should be celebrated as the greatest human achievement of our time. These facts should also reassure younger generations that the current institutions in place are working, contrary to the doom and gloom they’ve been indoctrinated with.
Capitalism, after all, has been the only system in history to have provided successful outcomes that allow individuals the freedom to innovate.
But almost every institution, from the media to the education hierarchy, has been white-anted by people wedded to Marxist, anti-capitalist dogma. Facts be damned.
The mantra being sold to my generation…is false, and can simply be used by governments and groups to cater to their own agendas as we have seen in history, the most extreme ones being under the communist societies of Kim’s North Korea and Stalin’s Russia where a centralised drive for the perfect utopia by any means necessary, through gross resource allocations, resulted in the deaths of untold millions […]
My parents and grandparents’ lives were marked by various world wars and conflicts with the collapse of the Soviet Union being the main one […]My generation’s pessimism now risks turning this backwards.
dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/young-people-need-to-look-at-the-facts-about-the-true-state-of-the-world
If saner young voices like Joanne’s are allowed to prevail, hopefully not.
