this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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It's usually fashionable for older fucks like me to hate on younger generations, but I'm genuinely encouraged by some of the noise coming out of Gen Z's corner. I can't comment on an entire generation, but some of the news headlines I come across, and the few young folks I know personally both give me a peace of mind for the stewardship of our planet after the fuckups of boomers and inaction of Gen X.
Inaction of who? I hear you say, and yes, we're so inactive that we're barely noticeable.
Which actions could gen X take to prevent the Anthropocene extinction from becoming a mass extinction event? We're such a small cohort that there's not enough of us to vote-in ethical parties. Should we jail or hang most of the boomers, biological parents, drivers, and fliers undemocratically? There's not enough of us to vote-in crimes-against-life laws.
Isn't our inaction the best we can do? By many more of us not contributing to unsustainable levels of human overpopulation, we're at least much less complicit in the biggest cause of anthropogenic climate change and the root cause of almost all the major existential/ethical problems facing us.
By not flying and driving, we're not complicit in the 2nd and 3rd biggest omnicidal acts.
By not consuming animals, we're not complicit in factory-farming and fishing - which causes more pain and suffering than all other atrocities ever committed in history, combined. Hundreds of billions of animals are enslaved in torturous conditions and trillions of fish tortured to death every year.
We're too small a group to fix things, but we can abstain from the psychotic things older people think are normal.
Millennials and gen Zs are turning out on average to be much more ethical than us gen Xers, and they might actually vote in Greens once enough boomers die out. Hopefully that happens before anthropogenic climate change cascades.
You say you're too few to do much but what you are doing is a massive contribution already. As the population ages, more boomers are going to die off and gen X are going to raise more children to be conscientious people who act with integrity.
It might take another 20 years but then we'll have the numbers from millennials, Z and X (am I forgetting anyone? The generation labelling confuses me) to truly effect change