Why Is The World Going Backwards?

 Why does the world seem to be going backwards?

Let me expand on this idea. I am a member of the post-war generation. In our childhood, Nazis were recent, and evil, history. Despite how some see ‘boomers’ now, as we grew up we saw ourselves as progressive, throwing off the ‘fuddy-duddy’ ideas of the ‘old days’. There was also an implicit belief in science, and we assumed that the world would continue to improve as a result of it. Many of us, as we got older, joined movements like feminism, civil rights, gay rights, anti-nuclear and so on. Conservative, reactionary forces were pushed back. Onward and upward from here on, we all assumed.

Over time, however, something happened. Maybe we got tired, or burnt-out, or moved on to new things. Or we just got old. And these movements ...changed. Their focus changed. A lot of the younger generation seemed to think that all the battles had been won anyway, or perhaps they were too busy just struggling to survive in the new neo-liberal economy (which, contrary to popular opinion, boomers neither invented nor put into place). We entered a new century. Society changed. The world changed.

Somehow, from somewhere, the reactionary forces have risen again. Religion, which once seemed a spent force, has surged back, gaining a new viciousness. The prejudiced, who’d seemed few and quiet for decades, have also surged back. In the US, right-wing Christians have taken control of the Republican Party, and are now trying to control the voting process and deny voting rights to minorities. Also in America, white supremacists have surged in numbers and power, infiltrating police forces. Even the Nazis have come back.

Around the world, there’s been a surge of new, egomaniacal leaders, from Trump to Putin to Bolsanaro, as well as of those willing to follow their lead or their example, who are openly and actively oppressing minorities (eg Russian gays, China’s Uighur people), or suppressing all opposition. Yes, there have been dictators in the past (think Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Pinochet) but I guess we assumed that this kind of leader was a thing of the past, that the world was becoming more democratic.

As well as all this, there’s emerged, in a portion of the populace that even if small is still way, way too many, a level of mistrust of/hatred for government, media, scientists and doctors that is beyond reason, and a phenomenal growth in anti-vax sentiments, something that would have shocked and baffled previous generations, who eagerly embraced new vaccines as a public good.

So what happened?

Why does the world seem to be reverting to the philosophies of a former era, only with some deadly and vicious new twists?

When and how did it become okay to be a Nazi, to say ‘six million wasn’t enough’, and to have *actual* torchlit processions in the streets? When did it become okay again to be openly racist? And when and how did hippies, New Agers and other ‘leftie-ish’ types become allied with *actual* Nazis and white supremacists?

When did a subset of feminists turn into transphobic TERFS? How did they hijack feminism to mean actively working to suppress trans rights and freedoms? (Yes, back in the day these opinions were around, but rarely and only casually expressed, there wasn’t this vehemence, and they certainly weren’t organised.)

When did science and medicine lose their rep so badly that many not only don’t understand them, but consider them corrupt? When did it become okay to be an anti-vaxxer, and not get laughed out of the neighbourhood as dangerous or deluded? When did the tide of misinformation start? Is Wakefield totally to blame, or is there more to it?

When did expertise - in any field – become a thing to be derided and ignored in favour of ‘feels’ and ‘instincts’, or some crappy website/guru/New Age ‘therapy’? When did movie stars come to be seen as more ‘knowledgeable’ about science than actual scientists? When did the ludicrous idea that nature is always beneficial and ‘nice’ gain traction?

And when did simply using your common sense and objecting to any of this come to mean that you’re ‘sheeple’, or ‘shills’ for Big Pharma, and you get told to ‘wake up’ by those who obviously slept through science class?

When did ‘I want a haircut’ become of more importance to some than public safety? How  did individual ‘rights’ come to always outweigh collective good? When did it become okay to storm or besiege your centres of government, just because you don’t like their decisions, or the result of a democratic vote?

When did it become okay to blame anything on a generation (usually boomers or millennials), rather than the real culprits, that obscenely wealthy one percent who are steadily draining the rest of us and screwing up the environment?

When did it become necessary, in the eyes of the media, to present the arguments of anti-vaxxers and other science-illiterates as a ‘legitimate viewpoint’, and interviewing them as presenting journalistic ‘balance’?

When did we go from an understanding that some politicians are corrupt, sometimes, to the belief among some that all politicians are corrupt all of the time, everywhere, and that the media are nothing more than their lackeys? When did these people start to close their ears?

When did the world, or at least a substantial part of it, lose its common sense? When did so much of what my generation fought for start falling apart? What happened to moderation? When did the (supposedly ‘civilised’) world become so damn uncivil? When did the world start going backwards?

What the heck happened? How have so many people lost the plot, so badly?

And what’s worse, is that it’s so blatantly obvious that a lot of these people just don’t care what harm they do. Dictators are becoming increasingly blatant. Putin smirks at the rest of the world’s objection to his egomaniacal invasion of the Ukraine. China threatens Taiwan. Trump openly lied, bragged and sneered. Anti-vaxxers baldly state that they don’t care about the illness and deaths they are responsible for. TERFs will post screenshots of trans people’s pain and outrage as ‘evidence’ of their ‘attacking’ ‘real’ women. Right-wingers blatantly work to undermine the ‘democracy’ they claim to prize. Reactionary forces, in general, do not care about the pain and misery they inflict. They would pull apart all we’ve gained, if they could, and replace it with far worse than anything we had before. And not blink at who gets hurt.

They. Just. Don’t. Care.

And yes, I realise that many of these attitudes had to have been only deeply buried, not totally eradicated. That we were probably kidding ourselves that humanity had turned a corner. And yes, I am deeply distressed and enraged by recent events, especially Ukraine. And YES, I know that my feelings and observations are very subjective. And I know also that there are still sensible voices and rational people in abundance, and that there has been, and continues to be, genuine progress in many areas.

And yet there are some undeniable trends.

Trends indicative of a deep distortion and malaise in our collective psyche. Something, somewhere, has become unhinged. The world all too often feels like one gigantic scream. And I don’t think this is ‘just a phase’ either, and that we will swing back again any time soon. Something has come apart, and I don’t think it’s going to come back together. We won’t come back together. Deep rifts have formed in society, over which there seems to be no crossing.

And as someone whose sexuality, gender identity, neurology, political views, degree of outspokenness and level of physical disability fall outside what’s considered acceptable by these reactionary forces, my personal safety feels under threat. This is not rhetorical or theoretical. Even in my comparatively ‘safe’ country, there have been anti-vax and anti-mandate protests, with violence and mayhem, and public figures coming out in support of them. I have heard people, in my own town, loudly claiming that vaccines contain microchips. The local paper frequently publishes letters from anti-vaxxers (and their opponents, to be fair, but once upon a time editors would have just tossed AV letters in the bin). There are anti-vaxxers even in my own street. And while New Zealand is not as religion-minded as some countries, nonetheless there’s a right-wing religious element which I keep a wary eye on.

I no longer feel safe where I am, and want to move, but I’m wondering if anywhere is truly safe anymore. I fear for the future, and part of me is glad I’m old, that I won’t live to see the outcome of all this. I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know where there is to go from here, what we can hope for, what we can do, on an individual or collective level. It all too often seems like the progressive forces are on the back foot. Please tell me I’m wrong. Give me hope, because right now I don’t have any.

The World Is Broken, And It Breaks Us

Call me cynical, call me jaded, even call me broken. And you’d no doubt be right. I’m tired of the world, I admit. Sixty-some years of a not-particularly-easy life have worn me out. Yet more and more I can’t escape the conclusion that it’s not just me, that this world is a extremely messed-up place. It’s broken, and it breaks people. You only have to look around you to see this. The world is seriously imbalanced, and seriously unwell, so much so that I’m not sure I even have the words to describe this deep malaise.

The list of things that have been wrong with the world ‘forever’ is long - war, genocide, grinding oppressions, colonialism, corruption, power trips, the structural and person-to-person ‘isms’, abuse of so many kinds, mistreatment and neglect of children, rape and sexual exploitation, all kinds of interpersonal violence, systemic failures which result in trauma to individuals, violence towards animals or treating them as commodities only worthy of existence if they bring some benefit to humans, the destruction of the environment because the natural world is seen as ‘good’ only if it can be exploited… This list is not a comprehensive one by any means.

All of these things wreak havoc. People die, or their lives are ruined. Animals die, species become extinct, and landscapes disappear or are changed forever, usually for the worse. And this environmental damage, despite some seeming to believe that it’s all the fault of us baby boomers, is actually (at least) two hundred years’ worth of pigeons coming home to roost. We’ve ruined our planet, and now we’re living with the consequences.

Much of this is (surprise surprise) due to people’s egos running rampant, especially those of many so-called ‘leaders’ (pretty much all of them male, but then until recently women couldn’t be ‘leaders’). They gather around them cohorts of similar-minded or at least sycophantic followers who aid them in damaging everything and everyone they can, in service of that ego. We need look no further than a recent American president to see that, but he’s only the most recent, and loudest, example.

Amazingly, these ‘leaders’ will have many faithful followers. Even when they blatantly break their wild promises and prove themselves to be liars, bullies, blowhards, narcissists, and megalomaniacs of the worst kind, some people, incredibly, will still worship them. It defies rational belief, but it’s true. You have to wonder what’s wrong with the followers, that they remain so deluded, or why they would follow such a person in the first place.

There are also so many day-to-day ugly things that people do to each other - workplace politics, insults, name-calling and put-downs, vicious online fights, dysfunctional family dynamics, public rudeness, snobbery, manipulative mind-games, and on and on, all the ‘minor’ nastinesses. These take their toll too.

Even if people don’t actually die from any of these things, they can be left with emotional and physical scars, and all sorts of ongoing problems. All too often, people don’t receive the care or support they need - because, sadly, many of those in power don’t seem to view them as a priority (if you’re Not A Productive Citizen, you’re nobody in their eyes). The rates of mental health problems alone are an indicator of the state of the world. Depression, reported loneliness and isolation, anxiety disorders, PTSD, suicidal ideation, personality disorders, and other serious mental health issues seem to be increasingly common. Maybe they’re growing, maybe they have always been high, when so many have ‘flown under the radar’, and it used to be social death to have a mental health problem, and often still is, who can tell? But either way, it’s not an indication of a healthy world. (Though it sometimes seems to me that being so-called ‘insane’ is actually the only sane response to such a screwed-up world.)

And then of course there’s capitalism, which is much to blame for the state of the world. Its late-stage version encourages rampant greed, materialism, arrogance, cruelty, selfishness and the cult of individualism, with an elite increasingly hoarding obscene proportions of the world’s wealth, while the rest of us struggle and get poorer. Ironically, capitalism had its roots in breaking out of the oppressions of feudalism, and now it’s become an oppressive system itself. I sometimes wonder what those first ‘capitalists’ would think of the world today. Any student of history knows, however, that all political/economic systems have their drawbacks. And as much as I would love to see an end to capitalism, if we don’t address the core problem – that it’s a HUMAN-CREATED system, with all of its failings being due to the failings of human nature, then we’re doomed to create something that will turn out just as badly somewhere in the future.

And then of course we come to our present situation. You’d think a pandemic would be a time for people to pull together, and truly some have. But then there are the rest. The ‘all rights, no responsibility’ types who insist on their ‘free-dumb’, at any cost. The lockdown protestors who think their right to a haircut is more important than people’s lives. The anti-vaxxers who can’t see further than the end of their own ignorant noses. Science deniers and conspiracy theorists in general, who are irrationally convinced the ‘gubmint is out ta get them’. Flaunting their views on the toxic parts of social media, their ‘movements’ often strangely married to groups like fascists or flat-earthers. What is wrong with all these people? Did they leave their brains behind somewhere? The selfishness and foolishness of all of them blows my mind.

If everyone had knuckled down last year when Covid first appeared, it would almost certainly be all over by now. There would have been no Delta variant, and we really would have our lives back. New Zealand licked it, and we’ll hopefully do so again, even Delta. We’re not better than anyone else, just simply lucky enough to have good leadership. Some other countries’ leaders, however…. Well. There go those egos again, and rampant selfishness and greed (‘We must preserve the economy’ ie Big Business profits, including theirs), refusal to listen to scientific experts, blah blah blah. And too many following their lead.

All this is bad enough. There are glaring predicaments everywhere, damaged people and damaged systems and damaged countries, wherever you look. So much damage, so many walking wounded. The world is so chaotic, if it was a person I’d say it needed a personality transplant. As it is, I can’t help a sneaking sympathy for those who want to tear it all down and start again.

But there are so many ways in which autistics become extra-damaged by all of this. People take their anger, or pain, or egotism, or their craving for power, or simply their demand for something – anything - to fill up the emptiness within, and put it Out There. They will dump it onto whoever is nearest that looks like a possible target, and sometimes that’s us. Because we’re too obviously ‘different’, too ‘weird’, too ‘not like them’, we ‘behave too badly’, and are, all too often, too unprotected from anyone seeking to harm us.  

The world fails us. We find the world confusing and often overwhelming as it is. We’re often more sensitive to ‘bad vibes’, and don’t understand others’ bad behaviour. But add in all the crap we get from NTs as well, simply for the ‘crime’ of being autistic, and it’s no wonder we are especially traumatised by it all. I’ve said it before, and it’s been said by others too, that I don’t think there is an untraumatized autistic in the world, unless they are very young and/or very protected. The very shape of how autism is perceived by the world is shaped by our trauma. Yet there’s something deeply ironic about a world that demonises us when it can’t even properly face its own demons.

The only two things that give me any hope are, firstly, the number of good people in the world, trying to make it at least a little better, including so many of my friends. If more of them were in power, maybe the world wouldn’t be in such a mess. The second thing is young people. Their passion and energy, their concern for the environment, their determination, the way they have Big Goals but are also clear-headed about the shape of the world, lifts my spirits. I feel a little less gloomy about the future when I see them in action.

But otherwise, all I can see is that the world is broken, and it breaks us, even more than others. The world needs healing, and so do we.

Tell me I’m wrong. But I think I’m not.

A Word About Baby Boomers

Something which lately has begun to make me really mad, is how often baby boomers get blamed for so much by younger generations. It seems they look around, see the world in a mess, realise that many of the world’s leaders are of my generation, and go “oh, it must be all the baby boomers’ fault!”

Ah, no. We didn’t create this world, we inherited it, and blaming us for the state of the world is like blaming someone for the state of a 400-year-old house they’ve been left. Maybe if more of the previous generations were still around, you’d be dumping on them too. But they’re not, so it all – unfairly – lands on us.

So, for the record, let’s look at some of those accusations.

SOCIAL CHANGE. Boomers are often described as ‘entitled’. ‘Confident’ is actually a better word. When we were young, we looked at our parents’ world and found it stodgy, straitlaced and restrictive. We thought we not only could, but should, change the world. It’s no coincidence that a whole heap of fervent social movements cranked into high gear around the time we started coming to young adulthood, everything from feminism to gay rights to black power and indigenous rights. (What? You thought the baby boom was only a white, middle-class, American thing?) And yes, I know that plenty older than us fought too, just as some of us didn’t, but we had the numbers and the youthful fervour to carry things through.

Ever enjoyed a women’s/indigenous/black studies course? Gay and married? Out and proud? A single woman who’s adopted a child or taken out a mortgage, or married and didn’t have to ask your husband for permission to start a business or take out a loan? Used the services of a rape crisis centre, sexual health service, or battered women’s shelter? Pierced a ‘glass ceiling’, or forged a career in a field not traditional for your gender? A stay at home dad? These and many more are things my generation fought for. You’re welcome.

And that struggle, the sheer societal and political inertia, was way more immense than anyone younger than about fifty can now imagine. It wasn’t even the active right-wing push-back of recent years, but rather a total ignoring or just blocking of us, no doubt in the hope that we’d just go away. The sheer energy it took to chip away at this, year after year after year, saw many of our finest burn out. And no, we’re not asking for a medal or anything, but we certainly didn’t expect that forty years later, younger generations would turn around and call us ‘selfish’.

TECHNOLOGY. I recently saw a post sneering about a female baby boomer who was obviously something of a technophobe, and the implication seemed to be that all of us are. Nope. You want technophobes? Look at my parents’ generation, in their 80s and 90s if they’re still alive. And personally, though I’m hardly a genius or geek, if I get my hands on any new tech, I can usually figure out how to use it without much trouble. Several years back, for instance, I sussed out my mother’s new cellphone in about fifteen minutes – by the time she died, she still hadn’t figured out how to even check her texts. She wasn’t alone in this, and I’m not alone in being a baby boomer good with technology either.

And please remember, a lot of this technology was invented or developed by baby boomers. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are or were all boomers, and goodness knows how many of those early technicians, programmers, and other inventors were of our generation too. Quite a few, I should imagine.

ECONOMY. Despite what some think, we didn’t single-handedly create the current destructive economy.  Capitalism has been around for centuries, and the toxic mess that is modern neo-liberalism was dreamt up before boomers were even born. And it was during the 80s, under leaders like Thatcher (UK), Reagan (US), Bob Hawke (Australia) and David Lange and Roger Douglas (NZ) – NONE of whom were boomers – that these policies were put into practise. Plenty of us protested and campaigned against those policies, alas fruitlessly, and now it’s considered ‘business as usual’. NOT. OUR. FAULT.

As for whether some of us are now ‘plundering the world’s economic resources’ to feather our retirement nest, a few might be, but let me assure you, way more of us are in the struggling or desperate classes. And a lot of the most obscenely rich aren’t actually of our age cohort - of the top ten, only Bill Gates (1955), and Bernard Arnault (1949) are definitely boomers. (Jeff Bezos, born in 1964, is only marginally one.) And of those boomers who are ‘plunderers’, they’re not doing it because they’re boomers, but because they’re rich people doing what rich people always do, given the opportunity. Seems like lots of people are just in it for themselves these days, and you can thank those neo-liberals for that.

In a world where our numbers mean not only has the economy grown (as it tends to do with a larger population), we’re perhaps more visible, and the wealth of the wealthiest boomers more bloatedly huge, so it seems like we’re everywhere. Plenty of us don’t like them anymore than you do. I for one would gladly see those obscene inequalities disappear.

ENVIRONMENT. FYI, we didn’t single-handedly destroy the environment either. The damage that’s starting to be really visible now, is the result of trends that began long before we were born (think Victorian factories belching smoke, rivers choking with pollution long before World War Two, plastic introduced while we were still babies). Rachel Carson’s seminal book ‘Silent Spring’ was published in **1962**, when even the oldest of us were barely in high school.

To take just one environmental issue as an example – New Zealand has a problem with its old rubbish tips. We have a long coastline, and in the past, local councils have used many pockets of it to dump rubbish in. Just this year, one of these old tips, previously thought safely capped, was washed out during a storm, and the clean-up is still underway months later. And it’s just one of many such former tips around the country which are now threatened by rising sea levels – and most of which date back before we were even born. Get the picture?

I grew up in a world where the height of environmental consciousness was being a ‘tidy Kiwi’ and picking up our litter. A lot of us moved on from there, joining Greenpeace, marching for a nuclear-free zone, some even became back-to-the-land hippies. Speaking strictly for myself (though I know I’m not alone in this), I’ve been ‘reducing, reusing, recycling’, not to mention composting, since long before it got fashionable. I consciously work on ways to further reduce my impact on the planet, as I’m quite sure many others do.

We may not have done as much as younger people would like, but we’ve not been idle either. And though I can’t prove it, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that real efforts to clean up the environment have only begun as we’ve gotten older and at least some of us have gathered power and influence. If those efforts aren’t going to be enough, blame those Victorian factory owners, the 20^th century industrialists, the generations who created those sorry rubbish tips, and everyone who ignored all the warnings as far back as the 60s. The damage is cumulative, and the world has certainly reached a tipping point, but humankind has been ruining the planet for the last two hundred years, there’s no way you can put all the blame on us.

POPULATION. I’ve even seen assertions that we’re also to blame for the falling birth rate in Western countries. (Supposedly, we’re too selfish to have kids. Never mind that many of us, including me, have.) But the birth rate has actually been steadily falling in most of the developed world for over a century, the baby boom was actually just a temporary blip in this. It’s an inevitable process, that as a country becomes more industrialised, religion loses its grip, improved medical care ensures greater infant survival, and people can get their hands on better birth control, family sizes always shrink. It’s worth noting that it was our parents’ generation who were the first to use the Pill, which in many countries was initially for married women only.

CHARACTER. Every time someone of my generation is rude or selfish or whatever, it’s blamed on them being a baby boomer, not just because they’d be a nasty person whichever year they happened to be born in. We’re not perfect, but all the worst traits we display I can see in other generations too. We vary in our politics – yes, the Trumpf is technically a baby boomer (b 1946), but so is Obama (b 1961), and let’s face it, Trump would be an arrogant, narcissistic arsehole whatever generation he was born into. Andrew Wakefield is a boomer, but so is one of his major opponents and critics, Dr Paul Offit, and anti-vaxxers seem to be mainly of childbearing age. And need I point out that it’s not my generation who’ve brought back the Nazis and made them socially acceptable in at least some quarters? Personally, I’m as horrified as any else is by that, as are many of us who grew up when ‘Nazi’ was the worst insult and the ultimate evil.

Being greater in numbers may mean we’re more visible, but we’re still just human. A lot of the things said about us seem to basically boil down to ‘I hate that there are so many of you’, which is of course nothing we can help! And that many of those who did the biggest damage are now gone or going is no excuse for jumping all over us!

I’m hoping I don’t sound apologetic here, because I refuse to apologise for the year I was born in. We are not The Enemy, not some kind of malevolent selfish force hell-bent on using up the world’s resources for itself, and to hell with the future. So please, stop blaming us for everything bad about the world. That’s as ridiculous as blaming everything on millennials. It’s a prejudice, a kind of ‘ism’, and like all such, it’s intended to shame and silence an entire group, and alienate anyone who might take their part. And that’s not on. Quit with the hate. We’re all in this world together, and we all bear the responsibility of making it better.