UUsed to explain anything and everything, the discourse on generations highlights breaking lines that turn out to be caricatural in many respects. We like to imagine that the new generation will be radically, monolithically different from the previous one, that it will blow a freshly avant-garde wind over the social body, where it is in reality often composite, steeped in contradictions, sometimes even being able to be retrograde. Nevertheless, this does not mean that, from one generation to another, the ways of seeing, of doing, of feeling in the world do not evolve profoundly. One of the main causes of modification of the psyche in the youngest is this unprecedented feeling of being born geo-proletarian, that is to say someone whose work force has been monopolized, not the livable future. .
“You are handing us a rotten planet”, regularly repeats my eldest son, from the height of his 10 years. Speech that he makes not only in front of my partner and me, but also to whoever wants to hear it. The other day, it was a friend who was entitled to it, during an aperitif which was not however sponsored by the Extinction Rebellion collective. Looking up from his barbecue chips and his manga, my son once again expressed his disapproval of previous generations, who left him a devastated Earth, before resuming his “crunch-crunch”.
The choice to look elsewhere
We adults are generally quite embarrassed by this kind of outing. Because it is incontestably just and justified, but it is also true that we are not the decision makers of the systemic logic in which we found ourselves. We did not choose, on a personal basis, heat engines, pesticides and motorway networks. We personally did not invent Black Friday, plastic and planned obsolescence. What we did, perhaps, was more or less consciously choose to look elsewhere, as the film tells us very well. Don’t Look Up, by Adam McKay, on Netflix.
As a huge meteorite hurtles towards Earth, a mixture of blindness and greed prevents the adults from seeing reality in the face. In this fable which metaphorically evokes global warming, the scientific warnings are rendered inaudible by the fact that all the discourses are equivalent, overlap, cancel each other out, making it impossible to grasp the imminence of the cataclysm. “The big ones, they talk, they talk, but nothing moves”, summarizes my son, with his childish words. hollow, Don’t Look Up emphasizes the need to quickly bring out a clear-headed and lucid look at environmental priorities. Of this, many young people are viscerally aware. My eldest son, for example, was much more sensitive than me to two recent events, of which I had not necessarily perceived the link, nor the real importance.
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