The old white geezer and the sixteen year old girl

Picture this: your best years are definitely behind you and you're not exactly thrilled by the prospect of a life tainted by male titties, a sagging paunch and an erectile dysfunction. Worse, this already may be a dispiriting reality.

 

But hey, you've got your SUV, your steak, your holidays three times a year in places Ryanair will bring you to at incredible low fares, in short: your well-earned, impressive carbon footprint.

Enter some tiny sixteen year old girl who looks like she's twelve and who has the gall to tell it to you like it is in such an unnervingly calm, unchildish way that it sends you into incoherent fits of rage.

Life's hard to come by for old white geezers in this day and age, and that is a fact.

Same can be said of most of the wives of the old white geezers in this day and age, since they have no-one else to care for than their disgruntled 'hubbies'.

For the old white geezers in this day and age, sixteen year old girls fall into two categories.

Category one: the forbidden sexual plaything that can be found in the sewer pipes of the internet or else might be picked up or abused locally in countries such as Thailand.

Category two: the little teenie girl that sillily chirps away about her teenie girly things and has posters of horses and pop stars adorning the walls of her bedroom. The teenie girl that occasionally and endearingly may struggle with her silly little self, but still adulates her Daddy and listens to him when it matters most.

It is unthinkable that the girl in question here, the girl I'm specifically referring to, has posters of horses and pop stars in her bedroom.

What you will find there instead, most probably, are the climate models of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.

The climate models of the IPCC that relentlessly point towards the end of the world. Our world, that is, not the world in general, the world that was fine during all the billions of years before the advent of Homo Sapiens, and that will be fine during all the billions of years following Homo Sapiens' inevitable demise.

They've been doing this for years and years, the climate models of the IPCC, pointing towards the apocalypse, and that is why humans in their vast majority have carefully ignored them, have averted their gaze.

This young girl, that has no need for a traditional Daddy, that needs a traditional geezer-Daddy like one might need a hole in the head, does not avert her gaze. 

This girl lives in her very own world, but meticulously observes the world around her from her hygienic vantage point - and sees, with crystal clarity, a clarity of ice and fire, how the world around her really is.

And that goes against all reason! That is the pinnacle of unfairness! That child is crazy!

Crazy she well may be. Asperger her disorder is officially called. I'd rather call it: cognitive harmony. Cognitive harmony in a world of cognitive dissonance.

The young girl I am talking about once again elucidates something that we knew all along: young folks rock, and old folks stink.

Young people still have ideals and are brimming with energy, people think fast, young people struggle with life's big issues, and for young people, friendship is the most important thing there is to be found.

Old people have corrupted themselves with all sorts of petty interests, will let their shoulders sag a little more with every interchangeable year, are no longer concerned with life's big issues but with their insurance policies and mortgages, have no time left for anything anymore because they've become as slow as a turtle with tar on its paws, and no longer have friends but acquaintances.

Moreover, young people are prettier than old people, most of the time. Which is not unimportant, since a little eye candy will help us to get by.

Of course, it's always been this way. Nothing new under the sun.

Except that the old people of today really seem to be exceptionally bad. There may not have  been such worthless old people in all of human history than the old people of today. And by that I mean: the baby boomers and post-baby boomers.

Let's recap: on the ruins of the Second World War, the so-called reconstruction generation managed to build a world of unprecedented prosperity. Hail to them. A beautiful world it was, by no means perfect, but surely the most beautiful one that had ever existed.

It was up to the baby boomers and post-baby boomers to make this world even more beautiful by shifting the emphasis from prosperity to well-being. 

But after a hopeful start in the 1960s and 1970s, the baby boomers and post-baby boomers exchanged their hippie ideals for unbridled, insane consumerism, replaced the humanistic ideal of self-fulfillment with the nihilistic ideal of self-gratification, and thus knowingly squandered the future of their own children.

Willfully and knowingly, since there have been countless warnings that they were indeed squandering that future. Warnings that remained unheeded. And now it's too late.

I'm sixty. What would I do if I were sixteen now, and I was told that according to conservative and rigorously reviewed scientific models, chances are that human civilization as we know it will not  make it beyond this century? What would I do? 

Hell, I know what I would do. I would hurl all my textbooks at my teachers, and would go out into the streets. Which thankfully is what's happening right now.

And what do the old ones say? After they accused the young of not having any ideals anymore, of only being interested in smartphones and video games, they've got the nerve to reproach young people that they are demonstrating instead of going to school.

Likewise, the sixteen year old girl that the old white geezer takes umbrage at, is being accused of meddling in grown-ups' affairs, and that for her own good, she should behave like a "normal" sixteen year old. As if she's normal. As if everyone should be normal.

This sixteen year old girl has been accused of exploiting a paradigm of 'perpetrators' and 'victims'. But you see, there is a certain dividing line between the older generation that can say that at least it had a life during the best years of its life, and only ever thought of its own life - the 'perpetrators' - and the generation that has the most uncertain prospect any generation has ever had to face: the victims.

This sixteen year old girl will polarize in order to mobilize. The youth movement that she is setting up is a bitter necessity. Older people who feel they are targeted, would be well-advised to join her in the struggle of her generation, show some solidarity. It is the least they can do.

Otherwise, we will witness an unprecedented battle between generations.

She's also been accused of thinking in black and white. She readily admits that. "I see things in black and white and I don't like lying." Nothing in life is black and white, she's been told. "A very dangerous lie," she rightly says in this speech, the most impressive speech since the days of Martin Luther King.

One last thing. The elderly, when they've run out of excuses, often start talking about 'hope''.

But "hope" is poison. Or a narcotic impulse at best. "Hope" is in my top five of ugly words, along with smegma, fibroids, intestinal flora and toe jam. Older people always have hope, young people don't. Young people embody hope.

"I don't want your hope," I heard Greta Thunberg say. "I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic."

And that's when I realised that she and I are kindred souls.

©Carl Stellweg