Threats are always unacceptable. I think this just reminds us that many people can tolerate their own cognitive dissonance and lack of integrity quite well if the personal benefits of doing that are high enough. Others will stand up for principle despite serious personal costs. Sheep and goats. If reality and facts are inconvenient they can be ignored by the sheep until the sheep feel they’re really personally impacted. Goats speak up including for others.
Also minus points to anyone including journalists who over-characterise the differences between generations. That’s all just marketing. Always has been. It’s really unhelpful that young people are always being told they are kind and progressive (or that they should/must be!). Today’s youngsters, are tomorrow’s oldsters, and just as fallible and vulnerable as any other generation has been or will be.
All people of all ages can be kind and principled, and aggressive, and selfish, and lazy and gullible. But unless very privileged and lucky, it’s safe to say that older people will have had more life experiences to draw on than younger people do. Will be ever thus.
I hate this lazy unrealistic pressures on young people to solve the climate emergency or huge social problems because they care a lot about it. That is just an easy way for most other people to kick it all down the road themselves and not do anything themselves to tackle it collectively. Let the kids worry about all that. A dangerously selfish position to take in late stage capitalism which ignores the economic and other power disparities that are growing and entrenching all the time.
A genuine key difference between generations is that social media now exists which can’t be underestimated as a driver for human behaviour. Social media makes our ephemeral or undeveloped thinking permanent. That has a divisive and anxiety provoking effect for as long as it remains such an important part of so many peoples’ lives. Although social media can also help to inform and unite us while our lives get busier, which can be really positive. Trade offs.
In the UK only the mid thirties and older can remember before social media really took off here in our own lives with the uptake of mobile phones. So that’s a massive genuine generational difference that we do all need to navigate together. Social media is helping to go shape all of our opinions whenever we began using it. But real life still has to be lived. I think if we went back to many of these outraged Harry Potter fans in ten years’ time, due their own IRL experience accruing they’d say something different.
The older people who bring up JKR (in my small sample of people who have said anything to me about it) have all said she’s just been standing up for women’s rights as a survivor of DV and there’s nothing wrong with doing that. From one, the perspicacious 90s saying, ‘they need to get a life’ was also used about the people who feel the need to object to JKR standing up for women and children. 