Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb

I write this from the once-upon-a-time small alpine village of Gstaad, Switzerland, now a mecca of the nouveaux riches and vulgar, snow and manners having gone with the wind. Global warming is still a maybe, as far as I’m concerned, but the visual evidence right here in the Alps is undeniable. The glacier I used to ski on almost year-round has disappeared, and man-made snow is pumped out daily in its place. The reason I’m reluctant to believe the climate Cassandras is because their prophetic gifts have been very wrong in the past—Prince Charles predicted the end of the world some time ago, but he’s still flying private around the globe twenty years on—and that Swedish teenager who accuses us of killing her future is a publicity freak of Meghan Markle proportions.

In my own little way I do what I can against global warming: I drive a tiny mini, use a sailboat rather than those polluting stinkers favored by Arabs, and occasionally charter only propeller planes when flying around Europe. Never mind. More depressing than the disappearing white stuff are the manners of the people who warn us nonstop about global warming. Never have I met a ruder kind: young, usually bearded where both sexes are concerned, and, like all annoying types, holier-than-thou.

Amazon.com Gift Card i... Buy New $10.00 (as of 08:25 UTC - Details) Mind you, some of us oldies think that the hot air emanating from the climate warriors, the LGBTQ crowd, and their allies who encourage them to protest at the drop of a hat is the real cause of the snow’s disappearance. My son, who as a teenager used to lean left, has finally seen the light and annoys the ritzy-glitzy youngsters he runs into these days by asking them what pronoun they go under. What’s undeniable is that we have produced a generation of young people who pride themselves on being eternal pessimists. Life will deliver less, is their message. A wry smile is my reaction when I hear this stuff. I grew up during the last world war—something these darlings see on TV and in the movies, and it traumatizes them at times.

Like many others of my age group, memory serves where the almost daily bombing during the war is concerned. My family’s house north of Athens was near a small airport used by the Greek royal family that the occupying Germans had taken over to park their fighters. Although my German nanny and my parents had forbidden it, our favorite game was running out during an air raid in order to catch the silver foil Allied bombardiers would dump in order to confuse the primitive radars of German antiaircraft guns. It sounds more dangerous than it was. Three years of bombings and not a single casualty. Today’s youth have no such luck. They’re being bombed daily with exaggeration, intolerance, untruths, and outright falsehoods by Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, with millions of casualties.

No wonder they’re all so angry. Had I lived my life in the grip of social media, I’d probably be an inmate in an insane asylum by now, or convicted of having raped that pachyderm Lena Dunham. Abused, trolled, bullied, incapable of having a relationship, today’s youth have rap stars as heroes, and that includes the ghastly Kardashians and Hiltons. Social media is now the echo chamber where one hears nothing but one’s own prejudices fed back to them. Their inner voice tells them that it’s all the fault of the oldies, people like myself who don’t care about the future. Bad, bad Taki.

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