___ __ _____ __ ______ __
/ | / /________ / ___/____ _________ ______/ /_ /_ __/__ ____ _/ /__ ____ _
/ /| | / / ___/ __ \ \__ \/ __ \/ ___/ __ `/ ___/ __ \ / / / _ \/ __ `/ / _ \/ __ `/
/ ___ |/ (__ ) /_/ / ___/ / /_/ / / / /_/ / /__/ / / / / / / __/ /_/ / / __/ /_/ /
/_/ |_/_/____/\____/ /____/ .___/_/ \__,_/\___/_/ /_/ /_/ \___/\__,_/_/\___/\__, /
/_/ /____/
I've got huge sympathy for everything Alex Scrhoeder wrote in his diary yesterday:
Alex Scrhoeder's diary: On our watch
For most of my teen years and early twenties, I looked at the world with optimisim. The wall fell, hostilities between the West and Eastern Europe came to and end. The troubles in Northern Ireland ended. The World Wide Web gave us a global context that promised to bridge the divides and present economic opportunity to everyone.
Even when trouble reared its head in 2001, with 9-11 driving a renewed wave of animosity, I still broadly felt that most people of my generation were on the right path. Surely, it was only the bloated boomers generation holding us back. But, as Alex so rightly says, we now begrungingly have to look at ourselves and our contempories, the kids of boomers, and say that we're falling into all the same traps. The NIMBYism, the "why should I, if nobody else is" attitude, the selfish "just as long as I'm alright" attitude to the sacrifices required to stop disaster.
Why is there flooding in Valencia? Because you and I want our smart-TV to be huge and to turn on instantly. Because we care more about having just the right coffee, and strawberries all year round than the impact of what it takes to make that happen. Because we think it's fun to have ChatGPT explain the plot of Peter Pan in they style of a Donald Trump speech, without considering the immense enviornmental impact of that simple, worthless act.
We enable all this by acceptance. By inaction.
We should care. We should care a lot. Some of us do, but we're losing the battle. Because our contempories want a wider motorway. Screw that cycle path, we need more parking. We tut, we sigh. This is democracy, what can we do?
Well, at least one thing. We can speak. We can say, "this is not acceptable". We can choose not to let people's behaviour go by without comment. We can call them out, publicly. We can cease enabling.
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