The Chasm of Dark Sarcasm
The human past is mostly worthless. The culture that has been bequeathed to us over the millennia represents a drop in the bucket of action that made up the rest of history and prehistory alike. Certainly, the tears of billions made possible the glories of the species; the arts, philosophy, science and religion. But that suffering, in and of itself, was nothing, and the time has come for our species to be rid of it, for it is that very lexicon of loss which now seeks to destroy us.
And it is the youth of our time that will see to it that the past is vanquished. The past itself, that is, for the very concept is the Ursprach of delay, of nostalgia, of the clinging, clawing, clasping hand that lunges at life from beyond the grave. Let the dead bury the dead, yes, but one has to kill them first.
Two seemingly unrelated movements, that seeking to protect GSAs (gay-straight alliances) in the schools and the FFF (Fridays for the Future), seeking to alter our planetary fate – as its founder stated, ‘climate change is an existential crisis’ – are wondrous signs of life that youth is indeed alive at all. In spite of being force-fed ideology, consumerism, ‘commodity fetish’ and fetid entertainment, in spite of being surveilled by mindless homework, mindless parents pretending to be mindful, in spite of being physically assaulted in some regions yet, in spite of their naivety and inexperience, youth have begun to speak.
And what is this tongue that falls upon the dead? It has no name, for it is the language of the future, the very concept that seeks life and the fore-having of the beings that we are. It dares to open the unopened, it desires to write the unwritten, it disavows the grammar of grade and gradation, graduation and the gravel of groveling servitude. It senses that human freedom is poised upon unknowing, but that this state will be knowable in all its noble blessing.
But forgive me now; ask the sharpest of questions: will twenty minutes change the world, or one day a week? No, shut down the schools entirely, indefinitely, and worldwide. This will in turn disrupt the workplaces and adults will have to respond. Most of us will eschew violence against our children and will censor those who do not. There are simply not enough police to stop you. Use the power that you are.
It doesn’t matter what started it. Some of us don’t believe that climate change is due to human action. Who cares? What matters is the effect – the present – and the result – one possible future – which is threatening us. Another young person aptly stated, ‘why study about human history when there won’t be a world in which humans can live?’ Very nice. To the point. We also no longer live in a world where one’s sexual inclinations matter a jot. Again, who cares? Property will still pass on, gay or straight etc.. People will still love and fall out of love, there will be the bliss of wedding and the misery of divorce and your desireful tongues will finally fail you.
Your critics speak of ‘ideology’. Climate change is a ‘socialist plot’, GSAs ‘promote a sexual politics’, the classroom is about ‘learning’ and could not possibly be political. No one older than eight could ever be taken in by such bald-faced hypocrisies. Lying abortions of bigots. What of the ideology that the schools reproduce? What of the war fought daily in which the billions of poor take too casual casualty? What of the politics of straight-laced pig-faced bourgeois sex? What of the pearls before the swooning swine?
Now is the time to think. Action will come. Question everything before you, for it is actually behind you, rearing up, ready to crush your spirit in its vicious vice. It is the dark sarcasm of a world-species history, learned in the classroom, taken into the world and making it but a hobbling hobby of itself. You can do better, and indeed, you must. Young people of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but our past.
G. V. Loewen is the author of over thirty-five books on ethics, education, religion and aesthetics, and recently metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades.