A vile article, playing on stereotypes and accusing others in the movement of
lying (but excusing, by omission, herself).
"The young people currently negotiating direct action in the face of a future mortgaged to finance the gambling of the super-rich have no time to wait for their hair to grow. The drugs are worse these days, anyway, and the police more efficient"
"Young people today don’t get to sell out. We don’t get to slink away into
comfortable jobs"
"We don’t get to retreat into the country and live off the land, because the land is being torn apart for the last dregs of dirty oil."
"There is nothing the least bit Oedipal about the uprisings swelling and fading and swelling again in waves across the world right now. Oedipus, in the old myth, killed the king his father, on the road to Thebes and went on to take over the kingdom. In our story, if young people don’t stand and defend it, there’s not going to be a kingdom left to inherit. Aspects of this conflict are inevitably generational for one reason and one reason only. The people currently in charge of the money, resources and the political capital – call them the ‘one per cent’, call them oligarchs or call them, if you’ve
a certain sort of surname, mum and dad – aren’t going to be around by the time the real shit hits the fan."
"A lot of lies and half-truths have been told about the Occupy generation and its equivalents. Some of them have been fostered by movement members themselves. When I visited Occupy London in January, some of its spokespeople were keen for me not to write a story giving away the fact that so many long-term residents of the protest camp on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral were homeless people with multiple mental health and substance abuse problems. In fact, it’s been the young, the lost and the homeless who have driven these movements from the start – and to say otherwise would be doing a great disservice to everyone involved."
"Everywhere the so-called futureless generation is discovering that it has to invent the future for itself, with whatever tools it has to hand, even if it’s just a row of bashed-up tents and a way with anti-surveillance software. The greatest weakness and most-mocked feature of the new protest movements – that they’re peopled by youngsters grown old before their time, by lost kids and self-destructive vagrants, by
nervous proto-revolutionaries hiding their cynicism behind straggly protest beards and unwashed hippies in V for Vendetta masks – is also their greatest strength."
