How to pacify a generation: tell them to think “happy thoughts” about chronic social issues

[TalkingDog]

This pretty much sums up the case for angry pushback over acquiescent adaptation.

https://millennialposse.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/how-to-pacify-a-generation-tell-them-to-think-happy-thoughts-about-chronic-social-issues-2/

Telling young people to create “opportunities” out of tragedy and crippling economic deprivation, which is seizing on the logic of disaster capitalism, is like asking someone to make bread out of mud and water then expecting them to have full bellies and be grateful after consuming it.

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This focus on the individual to modify their behaviour in response to oppressive social issues which they have had no hand in creating, only, serves to obscure the economic and social structures which block access to upward mobility and a “better life”. And those very people who did, in fact, contribute greatly to inequality and the housing crisis become invisible and therefore unaccountable for their actions. Such as Baby Boomers who have hoarded housing, only to rent them out to the millennial generation at eye wateringly high rental prices. Ron Goodwin, a 72 year old property investor in Auckland, New Zealand, owns 37 properties which he mainly rents to young people and the economically struggling. Recently, very publicly, he went on record urging other landlords not to be “too kind” to their tenants as they risk being exploited.

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Telling young people who come from disadvantaged and poor backgrounds to see the reality of never ever owning their own home as some kind of silver lining because you can “change jobs every few years,” as Dawn wrote, frames insecure work as some kind of lifestyle choice you can use to your “advantage” and it reeks of classism and privilege. So many young people, myself included, have no other option than to “change our jobs” not just “every few years” but sometimes every few months.

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What Dawn is suggesting is that we just swallow down the stiff medicine of neoliberalism and is echoing what neoliberal politicians and “self help” gurus have been telling us for a while now: that it is our personal responsibility to seek out the “positives” in social and personal devastation and growing inequality. “Once you accept that you’ll never own a home, money takes on a different hue,” wrote Dawn. This logic is an exercise is mollifying young people as it professes: we must accommodate to that which we have been told, cannot be changed and find hope in hopeless situations.

[truebluegreen]

1. FWIW, a 72-year-old is not a Boomer.

Other than that, good read.