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All This Could Be Different

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Sarah Thankam Mathews

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“So, when can your mother expect another grandchild?’ Mrs Dankworth utters, just as the tea is being poured. I stare at Mrs Dankworth, well aware that my mother’s eyes are on me. I consider a comeback, but respond with a lame, ‘I guess time will tell, Mrs Dankworth. It will depend on what happens in life and what Bailey and I want to do.’ It isn’t the answer I want to give. I want to tell Mrs Dankworth to take a short walk off a long pier, to swim with a pod of sharks, to have a stroke, to be eaten by her five cats. But I’m conditioned to be polite to a generation of people that can demand any information from me they want without consequence.”

“I’ve found environmentalism isn’t popular with many Boomers unless it gives them good social value; a round of applause for recycling or for purchasing themselves the latest state-of-the-art electric car. They were born amid one of the largest eras of value-by-resource-extraction, and they’re just not wired to understand scarcity.”

“I’m her grandmother!’ my mother repeats, now shouting. ‘I have rights. I get a say in how she lives her life!’ That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it? Rights. Who has the right to dictate to family, friends and the world about how people should live, how things should work and what life means? Boomers have expressed these rights for decades. And they’ve refused to cede authority and autonomy to the generations that follow. Even the Trailers live in the Boomers’ shadow.”

“The poorest person on earth is not the person who has no job, no cars, no money and no house. The poorest person is the one who has no vision. Visionlessness is poverty in disguise.”