My B way too big,
We have a lot of fun talking about your generation and drawing generalities from it. This morning, you are 20 years old, at 9 a.m. I remember it the way we remember an emergency C-section, swagged from a stretcher to an operating table. It wasn’t a generality, it was you, my most precious scar.
This morning at 9 a.m. we will be at Housing Court. It’s a rather legal beige decor for your 20s. I suggested that you see this as (summer) theater, a play that plays out in front of you and in which you are one of the actors. We are going to attend a “morning” at the taxpayer’s expense on the theme of climate change. It will be very instructive. And an anecdote among generalities.
You learn things I didn’t know about at 20.
You are much less naive than I was; social networks and the Internet, certainly, are denigrating, and we come across new words like “ecofurie”, “ecocidaire” or “ecoleric”. They say of your generation, the Z, born after 1995, that it is apolitical, that you are ” slacktivists », armchair activists, that is. You will read the book that your father co-edited — The Z revolution. How young people will transform Quebec (2019) — he probably gave you a copy.
It’s about you, about your tendency to hide in the virtual world, to confuse a heart with a vote, and a TikTok video with a general meeting, to have lost the instructions for rub yourself to social contacts. The real has amplified the virtual with the pandemic. We all have the socially cheerful smile muscle atrophied.
We suspected our fragile world, but we could not imagine another, except the same one, less worse
Twenty years, first loves, making your place in a world in crisis, managing the performance anxiety that attacks you everywhere, shoveling dreams forward, starting to look behind, understanding that your parents won’t always be there (your friend S, 22, mourned his father who had flown away this week on Instagram), realizing that we know how to take off, but not always how to land, that solidarity is the glue, love, the breath.
Generation Greta
You can claim to be from the “battery” generation. I was one of those who slept on gas and had my head in the tar sands. Always in a relentless logic of growth, these gentlemen in suits made important announcements last week by nursing their cheerful smiles and shaking hands. They are proud to commit your future with billions in the name of “green” progress, electric speed, economic performance, business as usual.
During this time, I am delivering farfale & cheese with vegan chorizo and tapioca with coconut milk and maple syrup to fill your fridge because we don’t eat volts and lithium promises. I was a caterer at 20; I did this for two years before returning to study at university. I haven’t lost my touch.
You are the same age as Greta, one of the idols of your generation (and mine too). A young adult Z also, Atanas, signed a heartbreaking text, “Ode to adult life and its hopes”, in our pages this week, in which he laments the hypocrisy that is presented to him as a model.
“Despite everything, being a young adult, I still play the game [… — et d’énumérer tout ce qu’il fait, études, travail, sport]. Every morning I wake up without worrying too much, as if not thinking about it would cure the symptoms of a sick society. The truth is, I know that my lifestyle is not sustainable. »
And its first torments are your first wrinkles Madam, and your first worries
There were nearly a thousand of your age in the streets last Friday to protest against environmental inaction and demand climate justice. The signs chanted: “Make love, not shop”, “Do you want the planet blue or well cooked? », “The future in our hands”, “The clean car does not exist”, “The earth is on the ground”, “When I grow up, I would like to be alive”. A sign left me skeptical: “The planet is almost as dry as your blonde”…
A civilization of fire
You have learned the lesson, “it is hope that kills”, because it tends towards the future. You prefer to cling to the present. Denial is fair game; it is a means of protection listed by psychologists against eco-anxiety and generalized demotivation. Action is also an avenue. But you refuse to let your leisure activities resemble a marathon, and only 6% of you think that the street is the best place to turn the wind.
Seeing the announcement of the Northvolt project made by our elected officials, I found this sentence from Dalie Giroux in his biting essay A civilization of fire : “We never thought about the fact that there is neither god nor devil at the wheel of the fiery car of civilization. » A civilization where it has been abnormally hot this week, both in Spain and here. Soon, we will have Indian summer (I know, we don’t say that anymore) in the middle of winter. Me, I watch the bustards undressing on my balcony, especially at the time when the sun sets; they brush past me and I still marvel at this winged freedom, the one we should have at 20 years old.
You were born on the right side of suffering, of the postal code, of gender, of the privileged, but not the right side of History. Hang in there, we’re also going to dig into your cynicism with a third link to win a third term. That perhaps explains why 48% of Zs didn’t vote in 2018. And that 44% of you don’t want children. You are more realistic than anyone would like you to be. Innocence in childhood, dreams in Z. It would make a great slogan.
I hope you will read the interview with Xavier Dolan in the last GQ French. His comments were already described as alarmist 10 years ago, because to journalists who asked him where he saw himself in 20 years, he replied “dead, obviously”. We don’t listen to the cassandres, even in the cinema.
While I wait to pass away in the air conditioning, I will continue to make comforting tapioca for you and your friends, to pray for you and to love you. Actions speak louder than words.
Mamou