In writing the last few posts, I got the urge to broach this entire issue of the climate justice movement and the generational question, so that is what I am doing now. The thumbnails have nothing to do with it, but it's quite funny if you send them via WhatsApp to your aunts and uncles, who impose a glitter GIF for every name day. They just might get a little "climate anxiety" too, because ultimately a fear shared is a fear halved.
The expression ‘OK Boomer’ encapsulates (...) the exasperation of a young generation that is tired of enduring and is simply asking to be respected and heard - to be taken seriously.
As I said: Blessed be the first "OK Boomer," because the phenomenal spread of the meme has made visible a generational conflict that was in evidence before, there were no words for it until now. Now there are, and now we can reflect on the enormous significance that this conflict has for the climate change movement.
It would all be far easier if you could identify a victim and a perpetrator at once: Someone to blame (the baby boomers, who were born during the economic boom between 1945 and 1964), and a completely innocent person, who bears the consequences (the millennials, born in the 1980s and 1990s).
"It would all be far easier if you could identify a victim and a perpetrator at once: Someone to blame (the baby boomers, who were born during the economic boom between 1945 and 1964), and a completely innocent person, who bears the consequences (the millennials, born in the 1980s and 1990s)," Luca Sandrini wrote in The Bottom Up. That would be easy indeed, but reality is different: A study conducted in 2019 shows that younger generations are less inclined to get involved in politics and society, and that includes environmental issues. It's no secret: passed over by parliamentary politics, Zoomers and Millennials are more cynical and disillusioned than their parents. Their attitude is often that of Doomers, who feel they don't have the requisite power to make a difference in society -- - an attitude that is understandable, of course, but also quite counterproductive.
In a nutshell, the time is ripe and, whether we like it or not, a prerequisite for changing our society and its production systems actively is to build a constructive intergenerational dialogue. So it is up to us to speak clearly about climate justice, transition (link to Belgium article) and post-capitalism (link to France article). It is up to us to be patient with aunts and uncles at the Christmas dinner.