We Are Cornering Future Generations in a Dark, Polluted Alley
What happens when they decide to fight back?
There are memes out there defacing the image of Greta Thunberg, calling her retarded, stupid, or a host of other things which are patently false and equally disturbing. There are FOX News hosts which say she is peddling fear. Ironic, since FOX is one of the best fear-mongering agencies on the planet.
Greta Thunberg, 16, may be the only person who is willing to tell the truth today. Humanity is doomed and it won’t take more than fifty years to see it.
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.”
I’m tired of the lies. I’m tired of the well to do, telling the rest of us our time will come, when if one can look outside at the world at large, you can see your right to vote, your right to eat, your right to happiness, your right to a home, your right to breathe free are all being removed by people whose only allegiance is to money, to power, to the ability to take from the Earth and give nothing back.
Those same greedy men, are only too happy to enjoy the fruits of our labor, for they would have no wealth without the benefits of our social order amplifying their capacity to lie and steal, without consequence, poisoning the air, the water, making every meal a toxic buffet of chemicals, plastics, and pathogens.
“Unemployment is down” they say. But it’s not. The tracking systems used to monitor unemployment only work IF you are getting unemployment. If you are not, then you are unemployed and NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT IT. The system reports, everything is good, while people are starving in the streets. Literally, living out of their cars, by the thousands, in tents under bridges, shitting in alleys, like this is Victorian London.
Is this the best we can do? No. But those powerful forces controlling the world have the least of us chasing our tails as they steal our resistance, our fortitude, draining us of our persistence with their constant assaults on our minds, our bodies, our willingness to persist through terrible conditions for the promise of something better which never comes.
A dark time lies ahead as those men in power pretend the air isn’t getting more polluted, the water isn’t becoming more toxic, the oceans aren’t over-fished, pollution isn’t choking us to death in a host of ways, pathogens fill our lakes, our rivers, our food supplies and the only thing anyone talks about is profit and tax avoidance.
The revolution necessary to save us is coming. We have planted its seeds and the children who will have no hope will have no compunction to save a society that refused to change in order to save them. Why should they be kind? Why should they show mercy? Why, indeed? It will require radical action to save the species. If Big Business won’t or can’t take that radical action, then the children of the future will. They’ll have to.
We won’t like that response. Not one bit. The alternative, however, is the death of all things. Literally.
Thaddeus works as a writer and editor for two magazines, the Good Men Project, a social men’s magazine as well as for Krypton Radio, a sci-fi enthusiast media station and website. He is also a freelance journalist for Polygon.com and Panel & Frame magazine. Thaddeus is the co-founder of Futura Science Fiction Magazine and one of the founding members of the Afrosurreal Writers Workshop in Oakland.
