Now's the worst time to punch down on the kids.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.”
Sounds like something you hear everyday, doesn't it? With the kids on their phones all the time, complaining if they don't have internet access and when someone talks shit about a topic that's sensitive to them?
Guess what? That quote at the beginning is by Socrates, from Plato's Republic. Punching down and belittling the youth isn't new, and somehow, the people being told that grow up exactly to be the kind of people that say the same to their own younger contemporaries. Maybe we should stop doing that? It's getting- wait...
It already is old.
Not just in general, but especially in today's world where the younger generation really does have reasons to be both be absolutely livid and be wrapped in overwhelming dread and sorrow.
Climate Change is set to irreversibly end the world as we know it. [1]
Rise of global fascism [2] set to destroy what little freedoms we still have in this ever-growing gap between the rich and poor [3] in this capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in.
This isn't to say that some of the “overly sensitive teenagers” arguments are purely without reason. However, the examples that they give me, like in the countless “triggered millenials” and “SJW OUTRAGE” vids on Video Uber (Youtube) all either point to misdirected anger, provocation into anger by trained hucksters like Mr. Punchable Face, Ben Shapiro, or Manufactured Outrage in order to garner attention and sell either an idea or a product. (Full disclosure, I'm also selling you on an idea as we speak, but that's really just how communication works.)
But hey, details, right?
Someday soon, probably too soon, we're gonna need to band together for common causes if we're going to survive the next coming decades, and we're gonna need the energy, commitment and manpower that they could provide. The concentration camps (Yes, honest to horribleness concentration camps) at the southern US border are just grim previews of what billions in the world will experience once the worst of the extreme weather and rising ocean tides begin rearing their heads.
I hate to sound like a Sunday school pastor, but once that happens, the world will be split into exactly two camps: Those that'll fight against the horrors the powerful will inflict upon the weak, or those by apathy, or even outright collaboration, enable them.
We're gonna need each and every hand we could get once SHTF, and nothing breaks the spirit more than seeing your friends on the opposite side of a war. Belittling and denigrating people who would otherwise be on your side would prove disastrous, because those who are alienated from the rest of society are pushed to extremism and acts of senseless violence especially at the whims of “strong no-nonsense leaders” like Trump, Duterte, Mussolini and Hitler
And if I'm starting sound hyperbolic about a lot of this, then I apologize. One way or another, the severity of our siuation cannot be understated. At the very least, we stand to gain more from realizing each other's vulnerabilities and form our collective action from there than being at each other's throats.
So maybe we can just agree that today is the worst time to be punching down on the youth?