Greta Pan and the Tik-Tok Crocodile

Time for the girl to grow up

The desire to be a forever child, this time in 24 hour news cycle technicolour. To shout simplistic slogans, to provide simplistic solutions, to be a complete simpleton: such is to be celebrated in our modern educationless world. To be an activist has never been easier. All you need do is write a three word mouth fart on a placard and you’ll have the world’s cameras lapping at your feet. Show them some old razzle dazzle and they’ll make you a star. The days of grappling with difficult issues are over.

Greta Pan is always in search of Captain Hooks to fight. Evil fiends who can be easily identified and slayed by a crocodile in a 30 second tik-tok. Just assemble your group of brain-dead adolescents and take a pleasure cruise to a land that only exists in your imagination. A world where arrested means kidnapped, where aid means your pack lunch and where genocide means anything you damn well please. Don’t worry about the consequences….you’ll stay immature forever to the applause of the crowd.

The picture of Greta picking up her Israeli packed lunch was ever so apt. The young girl, who had run away from home, had been rescued by her childminder. Just as the Mediterranean heat was beginning to drain her intelligence-drained body, just as the “essential aid” for Gaza was beginning to run out, Mummy and Daddy arrived just in time so that Pan could dream for another day. An adult of the same age, who had lived the horrors of war and the fear of an unstable “peace”, could provide bread for a girl who had never finished her education. “22 years old” means a very different thing in countries on the front line.

How long have we been told that Greta is an inspiration; A model for our children to follow? How brave she is to travel around the world to lecture us that we must never travel around the world! How noble she is to suffer a “kidnapping” to damn the fate of the truly kidnapped! 

Even were her conclusions right on any of her chosen issues, of what use is her activism to real world progress? She provides us no route map, no detailed economic analysis, no geopolitical strategy and no scientific breakthrough in carbon capture. She mocks the politicians who have to make the tough decisions and chides the people who have to live with them. She lives in a movie of her own creation where right intentions are all that are needed to save the day.

It isn’t only Gaza. It isn’t only climate change. It isn’t only Greta. It is the whole university student culture of simplistic sloganising. Of calling for bleeding the fleeing rich to pay for ever more unfunded entitlements. Of cranking up the national debt just to make us feel better. Of calling for the end of civilization to ensure its future. No-one is denying that climate change, the Middle East, poverty reduction and other issues aren’t serious. We all acknowledge that they are. Which is precisely why we demand serious science, serious research, serious dialogue and serious, adult, grown up analysis to arrive in a better place than where we are now. Yet our current crop of - what Kemi Badenoch calls -  “student union politicians” are bringing their unenlightened, Peter Pan analysis to the mind-boggling complexity of the real world. It doesn’t work. It isn’t serious. Captain Hook doesn’t really exist.

What I want from my leaders and future leaders is the understanding that some issues are so complex that, though they may be ameliorated, they may never truly be “solved”. Even our most blessed achievements, from liberal democracy to free speech, were slow in the coming….and their foundations need to be relearnt in every new generation. The world of false Messiahs and Greta Pans with their childish calls for utopia now have never improved our world; nor will they ever do so. Rather they lead their band of adolescent sheep to destruction of Jerusalem. 

This article is short. Very short. It doesn’t need to be lengthy because the logic of complex solutions to complex problems is obvious to all but the braindead. Unfortunately though, we live in a world of adult children. Those who never left home and need an Israeli sandwich whenever they go astray.  To these infants, even an essay of 1 A4 page is stretching their literacy skills. It makes their cranium an unsafe space, such is the violent redirection of their brain neurons. To them only a sentence will do lest they be enjoined to think.

So we are left to talk in slogans.
Simple slogans.
Slogans which have all the intelligent analysis of a baby crying in its crib.

So to the foolish in need of a three word summary, I provide one;
To the literate who can read past page one, I deign to accept.
It’s simple.
“End simplicity now!”

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For those that require a complex analysis of complex issues, this article might float your boat. Otherwise tik-tok is for you: