Why are the grumps so hateful about Greta?
Has there ever been a more famous adolescent apostle of activism than Greta Thunberg? She’s everywhere right now, what with the global school strike today, New Zealand’s planned strike next Friday, the UN climate action summit on the 23rd, and Thunberg visiting the US Senate this week.
This is the girl with disarmingly endearing braids and an uncanny resemblance to a Christmas elf. Yet she can still rock into Congress and tell them to ‘‘do better’’ at their jobs with the kind of firm-handed clarity to make a middle manager weep with envy.
She’s nominated for a Nobel peace prize, fistbumps with Barack Obama and has been the catalyst for one of the most earth-shaking global youth and climate revolutions to date. In short, she’s a cherubic Che, a global revolutionary icon for young people, climate change protesters and anyone like me who’s getting steadily more terrified by our impending ecological apocalypse.
So of course, there are a lot of people who really, really hate her.
She’s young, female, outspoken, a greenie and the face of a new era who are uninterested in stale ideas of how the world should work. Obviously that makes her a red flag to certain Twitter trolls, often the conservative, red-faced, bellicose variety championed by such happy people as Andrew Bolt. (He personally refers to her as ‘‘deeply disturbed’’, ‘‘freakish’’ and can’t understand why ‘‘someone so young and with so many mental disorders’’ is listened to so widely.)
I’m not exactly surprised at how much hatred she gets. This is the age of social media. Even a 16-year-old in plaits, who just wants to do something as pure as save the planet from turning into a scorched gumball, is fair game.
And the hatred she attracts comes from a number of places. Obviously, it’s partly because she makes everyone uncomfortable by forcing us to confront inevitable, ugly truths. She’s also an outspoken young woman, which still attracts the ire of many who simply don’t think women, especially young women, can be or should be that smart and provocative.
But it’s also largely because she’s Gen Z. And as someone who’s on the line between millennial and Gen Z, I can tell you that Gen Z and its mom jeans are now in the millennial club. As in, everyone over 40 rants at parties about how awful we all are.
Of course you hate Gen Z. It’s earnest and wholesome, which is not the key to likeability, and has a somewhat unfair rep for being fragile. And we all reflexively hate people younger than us, what with their irritating optimism and passion for life, which just reminds us how cynical we are.
But what people, especially Bolt’s people, really hate about Gen Z is that Z doesn’t care about the old world. It doesn’t care about boomer and Gen X ways of doing things. In fact, it blames those ways as responsible for this catastrophic mess we young ones now have to live in.
Greta Thunberg is the very embodiment of this attitude. Walking into Congress and telling them to do better is the sign of someone who doesn’t respect ‘‘the old ways’’; this isn’t someone who’ll defer to a sensible adult just because they tell her to stay in school.
This energises everyone who feels similarly frustrated by the cracks in the system to get behind Greta and her revolution. But it also makes those who’ve devoted a lifetime to diligently following the sensible old ways (and telling everyone else to do so) feel obsolete.
She attracts the ire of many who simply don’t think women, especially young women, can be or should be that smart and provocative.
It inflames the growing feelings in Bolt’s corner of the world that their power is slipping. They already feel the world is increasingly run by the activists, the Instagram famous, and the 20-year-old tech startup guru. The global success of a clear-eyed 16-year-old on a mission only enrages them further, making them feel even more ignored by this modern world.
The great irony is that Greta, and Gen Z, don’t think older generations are irrelevant. We actually see older generations as integral to creating the wide-scale change needed to solve these problems. We’re not challenging the right of older generations to have power – we’re challenging their lazy mismanagement of the power they have.
But Bolt & Sons won’t see it that way, too caught up in their own insecurity of supposedly oncoming irrelevance. Which is a shame, because they could be a valuable part of a solution to one of the biggest problems facing the world. Instead they’re ranting on Twitter, shouting ever louder and desperately trying to engage Thunberg (and Gen Z) in a conversation she isn’t interested in having.
She doesn’t have the time. She’s too busy saving the world.