What to say to the children born into the Age of Resentment

Often in the environmentally-aware online forums a version of the following question gets asked:

What are you going to tell your grandchildren when they say, "Why didn't you stop the collapse of the environment when you had the chance?"

In essence, "How could we let things come to this?"

My (future) response will probably be something like this:

Sit down, [insert hypothetical grandchild here]. Rest assured we Greenies were asking the same thing at the time it was all going to shit, and it was just as frustrating then. Possibly even more so. We thought the people in charge at the time were idiots. And there's a good deal of "I told you so" that gets thrown around these days.  But that's all a distraction.  I'm going to try to properly answer your question as to how we let a perfectly good planet go to waste.  

Basically, it was the tyranny of an idea that did us all in. You see, each and every one of us are born into a system that I call the Money Game.  This game is very real, and worse, it's mandatory to play- hence why I just called it a tyranny.  There's not anywhere on the planet that this game doesn't affect.  And by the time you're old enough to understand how this Money Game gets played you'll think it's perfectly natural and have completely forgotten that you never had any choice to opt out.  It just becomes part of your thinking. 

Little did we know, however, that just the act of playing this game would make it eventually grow out of control.  And by that I mean collapse of its own accord.  Inequality was built-in to it, like in a game of Monopoly. What's that? Oh, it was a kid's game back in my day. Never mind. Anyway, many of us kept watching the tidal pull of global inequality get worse and worse, and then even more worse...  waiting for it to magically balance back out, but the concentration of wealth never does this.  That's what the Money Game is.  It's how the game is played.  If you give ten people ten cents each eventually one of them will have a dollar and the rest will have nothing.  And that's exactly what was happening when civilisation started to collapse while we should have been concentrating on the health of our ecosystems instead.  The Great Distraction, I call it.  No-one else calls it that, by the way.  That's just me.   

Towards the end we began to realise, hey, wait a minute, we don't seem to be playing this game any more.  The game is actually ...playing us!  We thought we were in control, but we had it all wrong.  We were so caught up in this whole mental prison of money that we weren't able to see past it, to escape from it- which is why it often felt like we were caught in a Catch-22.  As if nothing we said or did could have changed anything.  

Of course, that's what the people who realised our predicament would think, which wasn't very many of us.  You see, the trouble with waking up to how the world really works is you quickly realise just how many people are still sleeping, which made things even more infuriating to people like myself.  

I don't know why it was so hard to wake the others up.  It's like the problem was larger than their field of vision, so they weren't able to see what you were pointing at, even though it was right there in front of them.  

But at the heart of it, our whole world was meticulously organised around the psychosis of money.  Even though it wasn't actually real, we had made it so our lives depended on it, when, really, it was killing us all along.

The truly sad part is we weren't able see through our delusions soon enough to stop what we were doing to ourselves, so by the time The Money Game had collapsed and our delusions evaporated we could finally see the horrors of our reality.  But by then it was too late.   

So I can understand why you hate us. I understand why they call this the Age of Resentment. But you've also got to understand we were all mentally ill. The Money Game was a madness that everyone had tacitly agreed to, and so it was this madness that became what we called sanity, and those of us wanting to change the system were seen as the crazy ones. 

Believe me when I say humans aren't very good at making tough decisions. There was no such thing as pro-activism back then. Instead we would just wait until a crisis would force us to change.  I know...  ridiculous, right?  But runaway climate change is a problem too severe for us to solve after the fact.  It's not something we had the luxury of leaving until the last minute anymore, and now that we've left things too late we have the bittersweet privilege of watching the Earth die.  Or at least our time on it.  

I don't mean to bum you out, but what I'm trying to say is that no matter how hard we tried nothing seemed to make a difference.  Good ideas had difficulty getting traction while bad ideas seemed to have no problem gaining all the momentum they needed.  That should have been our clue, right there, that there was something wrong with reality.  That something else was going on and we needed to figure it out.   

Money had trapped our thinking.  That's what it was.  We couldn't see what was really going on.  It's a shame.  A real shame.  All that lost potential of what we could have been... the disappointment can sometimes overwhelm me.    

I'm sure in the not-too-distant future, during the final ugly, petty moments of humanity's demise the last of us will ask: Did it really have to end this way? Could we have forged a different path, a better path, or was it always going to end like this and we just never realised it?"

I'm not sure I know the answer to that. And now that we're here, I'm not sure it even matters.

All I know is we just have to enjoy the time we have left, as best as we can.  That's all any of us can ever really do anyway.   

I guess this is what it means to be human.   

Also, I'm sorry.