Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison: are the Generation X leaders stuffing this up? – The Guardian

With their lank hair, in their dank sharehouses, wearing a bong-water scented flannel shirt, listening to woozy opening chords of some Nirvana song, there is an image of Gen X fossilised in amber.

But of course its not like that any more. Gen X, which includes former and current prime ministers Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Scott Morrison, have flown under the radar as millennials and boomers engage in decades of tedious generational warfare.

This invisibility has so far meant that blame for the climate emergency has not been directed at Xers. But that is changing. Gen X is in power and it is obvious that this cohort has squandered 30 years where they could have taken action at a structural and personal level.

The question is why?

Part of it is the underlying DNA of a generation that came of age in a time of high irony and profound nihilism, and partly it is because of good old-fashioned self-interest. Just like boomers, it turns out that Gen X also wants all the things.

Its not that Gen X didnt take the streets and protest its just that when they did, the protests were either cannibalised or cauterised.

Anti-globalisation protests raged throughout the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, bringing attention to global human rights issues and systems that needed structural reform. But these protests were interrupted by 9/11, the so-called war on terror, and never really got back on track.

And in more subtle ways, the protests and Gen X culture were cannibalised by the market. Brands started interacting with the counterculture sponsoring music festivals and working with street artists, Nike marketed environmentally friendly shoes and CK One with its low-key packaging and downbeat models was the choice of fragrance for the No Logo generation.

Then there was Iraq.

When millions took to the streets around the world, something curious and unsettling happened leaders discovered they could dismiss the protesters without any significant electoral blowback.

As hundreds of thousands of people gathered in central Sydney in 2003 to protest Australias involvement in the Iraq war, the Greens senator Bob Brown told the Sydney Morning Herald: This is going to send a message to our Prime Minister (John Howard) that he cannot ignore.

But he like governments around the world did ignore it, saying at the time: I dont know that you can measure public opinion just by the number of people that turn up at demonstrations.

He was re-elected for a fourth term in 2004.

It would be 16 years until the climate strikes led by Gen Z eclipsed the number of people marching against the Iraq war, an indicator that a generation that should have maintained their rage had lost its steam, or perhaps had just lost heart.

Published in 1996, the ultimate Gen X novel was Alex Garlands The Beach. There was something allegorical in the story, like a 1990s Lord of the Flies. In it, a British backpacker in south-east Asia tries to find somewhere unspoilt, not tainted by that ultimate boomer invention: The Lonely Planet Guide.

Of course what happens is when he does find a hidden tropical paradise, it is inevitably spoilt by selfish humans.

In a way, that is what Gen X did to the world taking pride in exploring and being an independent traveller rather than a tourist but in the end, wrecking what they loved.

The decade following the publication of The Beach would see an explosion of cheap travel that Gen Xers quickly took up without question.

Ryanairs profits over this time tell the story: rising from 231m in 1998 to 1.8bn in 2003 and to 3bn in 2010.

Gen Xers became and remained addicted to cheap travel even when we were made aware of the damage that emissions from flights did to the environment. Personal escapism remains more highly prized than collective responsibility. Alex Garland summed up the mindset in The Beach: Escape through travel works.

Travel around the outer edge of any city to the newer estates and youll see housing that is in a way representative of the mess we have found ourselves in.

These houses are built right up to the hilt of the block, with no trees, little green space or shade and sometimes overlapping gutters with their neighbours. They rely on air conditioning rather than smart design to keep cool. In the quest for ownership, personal space and comfort (all individual quests) Gen X have continued an ignoble boomer tradition of squandering an opportunity not only to make housing more equitable and affordable for all but to embrace building sustainability in a way that lessens the contribution to climate change and ameliorates some of its effects.

Rob Sindel, the managing director of construction materials provider CSR, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018 he estimates most of Australias 9m homes would have just an environmental one-star rating.

Gen X cant claim ignorance on environmental destruction we grew up worried about CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer. The climate emergency has been a long time coming, yet rather than act in our younger years to reform systems that cause the problems we have followed the baby boomers into an unsustainable way of life that prioritises personal comfort and personal wealth creation (often through the acquisition of private property) over the collective good and the health of the planet.

Gen X fell asleep at the wheel during the last decade or so when structural change could and should have happened, in part because of the surge in distraction. The internet became mainstream in the 1990s and smartphones and social media in the mid-2000s. Like everyone, Gen X lost their shit. After all this is the generation that still had a lived experience of using telephone boxes.

The focus and drive that is needed to fight for and implement major structural reforms to prevent a climate emergency were dulled through weapons of mass distraction and box sets followed by streaming culture.

But then again, Gen Xers martyred saint, Kurt Cobain, gloomily predicted this for our generation Here we are now entertain us.

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Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison: are the Generation X leaders stuffing this up? - The Guardian