I watched the above short video-clip forwarded to me on WhatsApp this morning by a friend of mine, and in which Ms. Greta Thunberg gets roundly dismissed by a rather crassly acerbic Australian TV anchor as “a poorly educated little turd” and also asked to “wake up, grow up and shut up”!
Greta is a millennial… or maybe an early GenXer.. She’s an inspired rebel who thinks she’s championing a world cause … but unfortunately she’s so immature that she isn’t quite aware herself how naive she sounds and how phoney and Utopian her professed climate-change ideals seem to the rest of a world that struggles daily with real-world ‘daily bread and butter issues” more than with stratospheric “green issues”. But then she’s still young .. and who knows, in time she will gain in wisdom that comes from even a little humility…
The young of the world … millions of millennials like Greta … are today economically doing much worse than previous baby-boomer- generations. Look at this Chart here below … although it reflects the American condition it most probably reflects the global one too. It tells you that on 3 principal economic measures of personal (not macroeconomic or macro-social) well-being (MEDIAN INCOME, MEDIAN WEALTH, MEDIAN DEBT) the rebellious, often self-righteous and vocally very aggressive Millennial and GenX/Y generations of the world are, in fact, far from doing as well for themselves as did their more hard-working and much less voluble parental baby-boomer generation!
I couldn’t resist the intellectual temptation to put “2 and 2 together” i.e. to read the video-clip and the Chart together at the same time and come up with a correlational “connect-the-dots” conclusion: The Millennials are not doing themselves any good today… If only they talked far less and instead worked much more than their reticent and humble parents, they’d perhaps make themselves prouder of themselves than they do now … and for more deservedly praiseworthy reasons too!
If Greta’s generation is to command the respect of the world then first it must do what it takes to prove that it is as much of an economic achiever as its parent generation, the baby-boomer one. Chances are that Greta, and her ilk, then might meet with greater success in their struggle for what they all want in life , and for the changes they wish to bring about in the world, than evidently they seem to be enjoying presently. … And at least , no bald-headed, nasty, horrible old TV-anchor then will ever have the nerve to call her, Greta, nor any of our millions of young teenage boys and girls like her, as “turds” or twerps!
Sudarshan Madabushi