My mother sometimes tells me about the anxiety people used to have in the year of my birth. It was 1999 and people feared the consequences of Y2K or "the millennial bug". Now, as we all know, the world as we (well, you, probably, I was a baby at the time) knew it did not end on 31 Dec 1999, but in a strange way the anxiety of our world coming to an end stayed with me for all of my life.
My generation was raised with the knowledge that some of the systems set up to ensure future security in our society were about to fail within our lifetime and that we could either hope for the generations currently of age and in power to take care of the world or prepare to take matters into our own hands.
Yet, especially in my youth I often encountered people growing more resigned and developing a morbid humor to conquer their ever-growing fear of the future. I cannot even remember the number of times I joked about how our retirement system would collapse even before I started to work.
Our retirement system is based on a "generational contract", which rests on the idea that those who work pay for the care of the retired. While this setup is conceptually
good
we know from prognoses that it will fail. We have known for years and the feeling growing within me is not hope but resentment.
The generational contract starts to feel like a fraud, a scam my generation could be suffering from for years and years. Maybe my strong feelings are connected to my old history teacher who I used to fight with about issues like this. He used to chastise our class (and by extent our generation) for being too apolitical and not having any "revolutionary spirit". Reliable sources tell me he fervently spoke out against students joining Fridays for Future protests when the movement picked up momentum in our city.
It is people like him my generation grew tired of in the last few years. First, we were not politically engaged enough – a concern that caused our politics textbook to dedicate a whole chapter to political apathy – now we are not listened to, because we are "too young to understand politics".
Greta Thunberg and all the other lesser well-known activists behind Fridays for Future have done a lot for establishing our generation as a political force and engaging with "adult, serious politicians", who are in power to influence future policies. Small steps are being made; the beginning of a long journey.
With regard to Fridays for Future's prevalence and momentum, the tides have turned again when it comes to judging our generation on their political engagement: people now express gratitude and admiration for young activists. This, however, has led to idolization of activism with little action to match these feelings. Political action by groups whose members are barely old enough to vote can only accomplish so much. The adults who idolize this movement should be picking up the torch and help carry it.
My frustration and anger in these issues are probably caused by growing up in a municipality shaped by open-cast mines and lignite production. The 1,100 residents-village I grew up in was lucky to be surrounded by far more (economically) important and larger villages, otherwise, it would have been torn down for it is built upon a shit-ton of brown coal.
The influence of lignite production is tangible in many ways in Düren's district: classmates and teachers moving house because their villages are torn down to make place for the open coal mine, the bus routes changing because some of the streets had to give way for the mine; the A4 motorway now being far closer to my home village causing more traffic and providing our volunteer fire department with more work; and a new village being built on the street I took to school, et cetera, et cetera. (1)
Once we went on a school trip to the Tagebau Inden (some of the parents in our class worked there), touring through the mine and being told how important RWE is for our region. Meanwhile, activists were camping out in the Hambacher Forst about 15 kilometers away trying to stop RWE from cutting it down.
I mention this because it shows the tense climate I grew up in: RWE is an important employer in the Rhineland but the devastation of our natural surroundings and the real-life consequences were daily concerns for some in our community. They still are and to be honest: I feel bad for not being one of them sometimes.
This is a truth that is hard to acknowledge and even harder to act upon: most of my anger concerning the inaction of our society in environmental (and other) issues is directed at
myself. I've been to Fridays for Future protests, I have signed petitions, I vote for parties and candidates that promise green(er) politics but I know that I could do more. I know I could and still I do not.
Right now, in the days of Corona, I can blame my own (relative) inaction on the pandemic but I know this is mostly sham reasoning and not the truth. The truth is that I have fallen into the pit-hole of resignation and struggle to climb out of it and to use my anger constructively. I must face my hypocrisy and hopelessness. Neither are easy foes to conquer.
Learning about ecocriticism in the 16th century was both a comfort and a new source for the all too familiar anger: how come we still face such similar issues like people did four centuries ago?
Maybe it would have been easier to live in the early modern age. Then, I could have blamed all my and the world's problems on the sins of my fellow humans and channel all my anger, frustration and hopelessness into praying to God and whatever else was appropriate to do for young maidens who did not plan to marry (sense my sarcasm, please).
The scene I co-authored for this project, A Pessimist Slam or: Maybe a Guide to Save the World, originated from my urge to get as many things off my chest as possible. This of course means that all the issues we bring up in our text are only touched upon briefly and not to the extent that they deserve and demand. (2)
Our text was vaguely inspired by our discussion of optimism and pessimism in class. (3) While it was pretty easy to relate to almost every problem we discussed in class the conflict between pessimism and optimism felt especially pertinent and is a conflict we have to deal with as individuals and as a society every day.
In my room I keep an artwork made for me by a school friend some years ago that features a definition of optimism as "Historically, the philosophical position that this is the best of all possible worlds, more often used to describe a cheerful or positive worldview". At the time, I felt that the second part of this definition described me pretty well. I thought of myself as an optimist – or at least an optimistic realist – for the longest time but lately I find myself in an inner conflict.
I keep the artwork right next to my wardrobe, where I face it every morning. Some days I still feel that it describes me, on other days I do not even bother to look at it. Apart from making me aware of my crisis of conscience and faith it poses the question whether art can be an agent of change. Can this painting change my mind? Can what we do in this project change anything? I do not know.
Lea and I chose the poetry slam format because it is a (literary) form that demands a passionate performance. Passion is a strong catalyst for change.
I am still trying to find a way to use my passion for reading, writing and academia in a fashion that can cause change. In the meantime, I start by being more conscious about what I consume and by buying sustainable products. Succeeding in these little things gives me some hope that I will be able to help change the world.
Because change is what we need.
Footnotes:
(1) According to
my parents even the weather in our region changed when RWE built the "Sophienhöhe", a 300m high artificial hill (the highest of its kind in the world) out of the soil that had earlier covered the lignite in the Tagebau Hambach.
(2) Recommended sources for some of the topics we covered include:
(3) Particularly the discussion of Thomas Bastard's Our Fathers Did But Use the World Before
(1598) and George
Hakewill's
Of this Pretended Decay
(1627).