Decade Of Despond: Greta Says Resistance Is Futile. Time Agrees

The news that TIME ® had named Greta Thunberg, the Bernadette of Bitumen, as its 2019 Newsmaker of the Year confirmed a larger fact. The 2010s can now be dubbed the Decade of Despond. 

Yes, memorializing the sad-eyed lady of the oil sands as the symbol of 2019 is near-parodic. As we wrote back in September, the Left’s veneration of her Aspergian outbursts is like some climate version of Wag The Dog. The shaming of Greta non-believers has reached epidemic levels as adults who should know better label her critics as child abusers. And her followers include everyone from the heir to the British throne, 90 percent of Hollywood and the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. 

But the “you ruined my childhood” lunacy speaks to her larger theme of impotence in the face of adversity. Greta and her followers are the hapless victims. In their acceptance of the fiery furnace to come there is only wealth transfer, rending of the garment and, as she so helpfully put it after TIME honoured her, putting the guilty up against the wall.

The call for the firing squad caps a dour decade on the Left now ending that, in its race to achieve victimhood, has resolved that all hope is lost. Retreat into your abused tribes. This splintering of the social fabric has been driven by a desire for victimhood and the rejection of meritocracy in society. As we head into the 2020s, seeing the worst in mankind is the Greta default position. Achievement is always at the expense of others.

As Jordan Peterson writes, this lassitude will be at our peril. "The fact of the endless multiplication of categories of victimization… was actually solved long ago by the Western emphasis on the individual. We essentially assumed that each person was characterized by so many differences than every other person (the ultimate in “intersectionality”) that it was better to concentrate solely on meritocratic selection, where the only difference that was to be considered was the suitability of the person for the specific and well-designed tasks that constituted a given job. 

“That works — not perfectly, but less imperfectly than anything else that has been contemplated or worse, implemented.”

Back in February, we contemplated the casualties of the Despond Decade and why we are so down on mankind. “We’ve never had it so good as human. So why the long face?

The answer, of course, is the fashionable “nihilism on fire” of the modern communications age. While we do live in the best possible time in the history of mankind— free of polio, privation and pirates— the dim bulbs of the Oscars celebrate a Malthusian future so they can place themselves at the centre of a burning world. 

Destined to do great things, they must be at the pivot points in times of great change. Because it’s them. Or, if you prefer, "narcissism on fire”.

So I find myself redefining purpose to young people who see— pace Hollywood or cable TV— no alternative to the dread fossil fuels or poisoned waters that are allegedly about to rise above our heads.

I remind my children of the infinite wellspring of creativity and, sometimes, necessity that has allowed mankind to survive and flourish. When they quote the latest dystopian drama about freezing in the dark or subsisting on radioactive plant roots I tell them how we’ve been here before.

Cow farts? In one of the more benign examples I remind them of the crisis faced by horse dung in the cities in the 19th century. As the cities grew, the mountains of manure left in the streets and factories of the cities by working animals was becoming an “existential crisis” (to use an AOC catch phrase).

The threat to health from so much dung was manifold. It harboured disease. When it dried the flakes blew in the breeze, creating issues for people’s respiratory systems. And, of course, where to dispose of it all? The pointy heads of the time despaired. Horses and oxen were the Mack trucks of their day. In NYC there were hundreds of thousands of working animals.

And yet, within a generation, the internal-combustion engine spawned the automobile. Rendering the working horse— and its droppings— a quaint postcard of a bygone era.

This is but one example of such creativity by man. Look at the dike system in Holland, the Salk vaccine, the microchip, the airplane, plastics… the list is endless of the solutions produced in a time of need by humanity. 

So as AOC and the fashionable media folk lament catastrophic inevitability with their disaster-of-the-day, take cheer from the real ability of humankind to face its nightmares with determination and creativity. We have been here before. We have survived. Whatever the current merchants of gloom might think redemption is always at our finger tips.

The only peril comes in resignation and despair. Don’t give in.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of his website Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca.