I suspect that some people who despise
the ALP don't want to find themselves looking like filthy leftists,
so instead, they're trying to frame political debates as generational
debates.
In other words: “boomers hate the upcoming generation, so”
… we (the boomers) are killing free education, universal
healthcare, and environmental action.
If you think you can keep your
right-wing credentials this way, you're a more complete idiot than
the “Western Sydney bogans” of uniform race, culture and
political leaning that you believe exist because the AFR's
Boss magazine tells you you're different from.
I mean it. I know V8-Falcon bogans who've fallen in love with nature and have more flexible political views than "hate boomer" hardliners.
Yes, I'm a boomer, and I hate hard-right anti-intellectual politics with the experienced hate of someone who's seen it all my life.
Since 1980 or thereabouts, I have
marched in environmental protests of some kind of other. I also
marched against the first
introduction of university fees, and I have written on this blog
about healthcare.
I've
also put my own money into my environmental beliefs, by way of buying
the business referred to in my profile.
We
didn't buy Bunjaree Cottages to get rich. We bought it because it's
about 14 hectares of mostly virgin bush in the Blue Mountains,
because we wanted to protect it from the kind of person who thinks
resorts involve concrete and lawn. A significant chunk of the
property is a hanging swamp feeding a permanent creek that flows,
eventually, into the Grose River.
Every
now and again, I have to give a refund to people who don't understand
wildlife and can't bear the ringtail possums running on the roof, or
the antechinus that can squeeze so tight you can't keep them
outdoors.
The
same plot of land is home to lyrebirds, wonga pigeons, echidna and
spotted quolls (the latter being an endangered species).
All of
which means it's really offensive to find that because some media
commentator has drawn a demographic line across political beliefs, a
whole heap of people
will accuse me of trying to undermine their futures.
Don't
believe the hype, kids. The divide isn't generational – you are
statistically more likely to be a hard-right voter than I am – it's
a political divide in which business has completely captured one side
of politics, only partially captured the other, and is therefore
barracking for the side it owns.
The
public demographers drawing “boomers versus the rest” lines
across age boundaries are the owned creatures of business.
They're taking part in pulling the wool, and it's working: you
honestly believe you can characterise my beliefs and actions purely
according to my age.
They –
the destroyers of the environment, ravagers of health, despisers of
education – have known how to divide and conquer since Machiavelli.
The
political nastiness in Australia is not a synthetic
boomers-versus-the-rest narrative. It's a simple ideology of the hard
right, paid for by businessmen with no compunction about outright
lies in service of their hip pockets, practised by politicians with
no compunction about telling those second-hand lies, also in service
of their pockets.
If you
believe otherwise, you're a fool – and folly knows no generational
limits.
