![]() Into this stew of unfocused anxiety we have dumped the inadequacy of our long prepared response to climate change. Do they really care, these old fools? Mumbling and stumbling around like an elderly relative at a family banquet that everyone gives twice as long, to say half as much? Power, meanwhile, seems lately to be in the hands of a sequence of buffoons and crumbling dotards who will be lucky to see another summer let alone the consequences of their own incompetent statecraft. ![]() ![]() They know that even if the rising seas don’t overwhelm them, geopolitical instability likely will. Not only is it likely to get hot, or wet, or something. Rather than the keys to their dad’s car - now an evil exponent of climate change - we have given them the keys to an e-scooter, and a broken down, over-heating world, panting and steaming, bonnet up, on the hard shoulder of history. Second prize in a Beauty Contest, and The Billiard Room. No, they have been dealt a hand largely consisting of cards not historically recognised in Poker at all. That’s the sort of thing I recognise from my youth - not good, but not quite bad enough to confidently fold. It’s not all sevens and eights, but with a lone Jack, kindling bitter hope. They have not so much been dealt a bum hand, these young men, as no hand at all. A little less social media, a little more action. I may live to regret this - after all, I have an example of this generation living under my roof - but I would like to see a little more rebellion. Endocrine disruptors? Cultural Decline? Feminism ? Or is it this climate of fear? But no one seems to know quite what is going on. Real masculinity has no need to recourse to poison. “Toxic Masculinity”, to the extent that it exists, is a by-product of this. Testosterone is in precipitate decline, with sperm count in lock step beside it. This thread on Twitter gives you the bare facts. But it turns out few young women are getting any either. The phenomenon of the “incel” has been widely discussed, just this side of mockery. Instead, their rebellion consists in collapsing like human bean bags, refusing to shape up, move out or show an interest in anything not framed within a glossy black bezel. Young men aged, 17-25, historically regarded as tearaways, delinquents and rebels in the Brando/Dean mould, are now more than likely to infuriate their elders by refusing to go out and roar around town on a chopper or drive a jalopy into the old quarry. And the more they “challenge” ideas about “gender”, the more utterly sexless they seem. But I am beginning to think some of their more jarring faults are more our doing than theirs.Ī trend has emerged in conversation, among many of my friends, of expressing baffled dismay at the sheer indolence, the aimless drift, the inertia of the little blighters. Now, to be clear, I don’t like the young any more than you do. This, I believe, is the pandemic that still rages across the West and might be our undoing. Perhaps worst of all, we drilled yet further into their soft, vulnerable skulls the paralysing horror of risk. We interrupted their social development and put them underneath a heaving pile of debt. We wrapped their shyly emerging features in sterile synthetic gauze. We also salted the earth of their future with broken education. But not only did we lock them up and compromise their physical and mental health not only did we disrupt and rob them of years that are precious and irreplaceable - unlike those remaining to me, which even at 57 feel increasingly undifferentiated, like broken biscuits at the bottom of the tin. ![]() ![]() The young were at no greater risk from this disease than from the Flu. One is that, despite avowedly following the science, our instincts were largely the same as those obeyed by the ancient Greeks in the hope of appeasing the gods, when they too were visited by plague. As the Owl of Minerva takes flight over the era of the pandemic, one or two things come sharply into view that might have been occluded when we were still among the trees of daily events. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |