During the same congressional hearing that featured Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, lawmakers also heard from an American teenager named Jamie Margolin of Washington state.
She used the same type of doomsday rhetoric we’ve heard from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. According to Margolin, some of her peers are wondering why they should even complete their studies since the world is ending.
Here’s a transcript via Tim Hains of Real Clear Politics:
I already have underlying issues of anxiety. And it’s really hard to grow up in a world full of “ifs.” You know, I don’t think a lot of people in Congress understand the conversations that are happening in everyday American high schools, but we’re constantly asked, prepare for your future, study for your future, do this for your future, but our world is full of ifs.I’ll be talking to my best friend and she says, “I want to see this natural place sometime — if it’s going to be around.” “I want to study to be this, if that’s still going to be a possibility.”It’s just like this constant looming uncertainty and it’s this weird form of nihilism and weird just fear that’s been existing in my generation where kids are joking, “Like, what is even like the point? The world is ending? What are we studying for? What are we doing?”…Right now it’s like some members of government and some corporations are actively pointing a gun to children’s futures. And actively making it worse, actively going out of their way to support corporations and poison us and destroy our future and that is horrifying and it feels like a betrayal.
Watch the video below:
Can we follow this same line of logic on other issues? Like, why are we even talking about making college free if there’s no point in even studying? If the world is coming to an end, why are we bothering to do anything?
On a related note, the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently put together a list of failed doomsday predictions.
Sam Dorman reports at FOX News:
Doomsdays that didn’t happen: Think tank compiles decades’ worth of dire climate predictionsRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested Miami would disappear in “a few years” due to climate change. The United Nations is convening a “Climate Action Summit” next week. And climate activist Greta Thunberg is on Capitol Hill this week telling lawmakers they must act soon…The conservative-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a lengthy compilation of apocalyptic predictions dating back decades that did not come to pass, timed as Democratic presidential candidates and climate activists refocus attention on the issue…An Associated Press headline from 1989 read “Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials.” The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” That claim came from an “international team of specialists” cited by The New York Times in 1978.Just years prior, Time magazine echoed other media outlets in suggesting that “another ice age” was imminent. “Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest,” the magazine warned in 1974. The Guardian similarly warned in 1974 that “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.”
Featured image via YouTube.
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