The kids are alright
“Are young people annoying? Yes of course. They don’t know jack shit and they act like they know everything and they mock our outfits, which we are certain are cool. More to the point, what chafes older people so much is, I think, the fact that younger people seem eager to pass judgment on the world without ever having had to navigate its many challenges themselves. We see their certainty as unearned, their arrogance as off-putting, and their smooth, glowing skin as an insult to our own mortality.
“What I want to say at this very fraught political moment, however, is this: The wisdom that older people claim grants them the legitimacy to control the world also demands the grace and humility to be able to admit that young people bring important qualities to the political mix that we lack. To high-handedly dismiss the demands of the young that knotty moral outrages be fixed, just because those demands feel simplistic or tinged with self-righteousness, is to reveal that we are not as wise as we claim to be after all.”
*snip*
“Who is being childish here? Is it the young college students, appalled at genocide looming in front of their eyes, possessed with the overwhelming urge to do something, who—despite not possessing a PhD in global affairs—flood into the streets and rage against the atrocity? Or is it the well educated and highly placed and influential adults, granted positions of great importance, who, as a crisis unfolds, as civilians are murdered, as neighborhoods are bombed, as oppression and religion collide in war, use their time griping about the hotheadedness of the young people protesting in the streets? Which of these groups has more accurately identified what should be our current topic of attention—the young people whose focus is on the governments that possess militaries and missiles and are poised to cause thousands of deaths, or the adults whose focus is on how some college kid said something annoying at a DSA rally? Wake the fuck up. The adults in the room are everywhere proving the kids’ critique to be true.”
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