Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Get an education, Merlin Luck
I don’t know if it’s just Pick On 24 Years-Olds Week for me or what, but Generation Y has been giving me particular dyspepsia of late. (Checking my archives, I see that this could also simply be a case of a seasonal/Spring malady).
In terms of Merlin Luck’s outpourings today, I’m not really het up either way about the underlying issues – it’s just Merlin’s god-awful understanding of recent (yes, even in his school-age lifetime) history that so irks me:
Politics used to be cool. From what I've heard there was actually a time where it was fashionable to be concerned with human rights issues - back in the days of the anti-Vietnam movement, back when the Live Aid concerts raised millions of dollars for Ethiopia and forced governments to re-evaluate their aid policies.
Human (and other species, too) rights issues – like the Australian* environment, an accessible and quality higher education sector, and jobs – have been more aggressively fought for considering the economic circumstances** by GenX since the mid-80s, than by any other generation at any other time. So I’m the protest generation, Merlin – and yet we don’t even get a mention in your let’s-just-skip-a-whole-generation world view.
While I’ll leave it to Jack Strocchi (same URL) to do the forensic post-mortem on the anti-Vietnam movement, I can tell you, Merlin, that Live Aid was a fucked-up debacle, an all-sizzle-no-steak production now only seen as success by misty-eyed but We-Rule-the-World boomers, their equally myopic “alternatively”-educated offspring like yourself, and – oddly enough – totalitarian China.
* "Think global, act local."
** especially the comment by me on August 31, 2004 at 03:40 PM
I don’t know if it’s just Pick On 24 Years-Olds Week for me or what, but Generation Y has been giving me particular dyspepsia of late. (Checking my archives, I see that this could also simply be a case of a seasonal/Spring malady).
In terms of Merlin Luck’s outpourings today, I’m not really het up either way about the underlying issues – it’s just Merlin’s god-awful understanding of recent (yes, even in his school-age lifetime) history that so irks me:
Politics used to be cool. From what I've heard there was actually a time where it was fashionable to be concerned with human rights issues - back in the days of the anti-Vietnam movement, back when the Live Aid concerts raised millions of dollars for Ethiopia and forced governments to re-evaluate their aid policies.
Human (and other species, too) rights issues – like the Australian* environment, an accessible and quality higher education sector, and jobs – have been more aggressively fought for considering the economic circumstances** by GenX since the mid-80s, than by any other generation at any other time. So I’m the protest generation, Merlin – and yet we don’t even get a mention in your let’s-just-skip-a-whole-generation world view.
While I’ll leave it to Jack Strocchi (same URL) to do the forensic post-mortem on the anti-Vietnam movement, I can tell you, Merlin, that Live Aid was a fucked-up debacle, an all-sizzle-no-steak production now only seen as success by misty-eyed but We-Rule-the-World boomers, their equally myopic “alternatively”-educated offspring like yourself, and – oddly enough – totalitarian China.
* "Think global, act local."
** especially the comment by me on August 31, 2004 at 03:40 PM
