BBC Two’s Rachel Parris Takes on Those Damn Millennial Snowflakes & Their Incessant Desire to Avoid Oppression
The last time we wrote about Rachel Parris of the BBC’s satirical news show The Mash Report, she was giving invaluable lessons in how not to sexually harass someone. Now she’s talking about millennials, and how older generations love to insist that young people are just “a bunch of weak, entitled snowflakes.”
Ah yes, snowflakes. Not since “social justice warrior” has an insult made it so clear just what levels of selfishness and insensitivity the user is operating on. Both are a shorthand derision meant to belittle anyone who cares about basic equality. And this desire to make their and others’ lives better really gets under a lot of people’s skin.
But complaining about people complaining is more than a tad hypocritical, isn’t it? As Parris puts it:
“The argument goes that if you complain about horror, injustice, or inequality, then you’re self-pitying and pathetic. Only this week, Matthew Parris in the Times said that the Me Too movement was about self-pitying and gaining victim status. Matthew moaned that too much of the media was devoted to women moaning too much. And we know this because he moaned about it in the Times and then moaned about it in the Spectator and finally moaned about it on Radio 4. That is a man who needs a safe space.”
“You see,” Parris says, “there is a determined campaign to conflate people being a bit squeamish about offensive ideas and language with people legitimately demanding change.”
Things that will get you branded a snowflake these days range from demanding basic human rights or gender or racial equality, to not wanting to get shot at school, to existing as part of the first generation ever to earn less than the generation before them. No matter what young people say or do, many in older generations will brand them “entitled narcissists.”
But, as Parris demonstrates with a clip of Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez’ impassioned speech demanding sensible gun control, “maybe these young snowflakes will cause an avalanche.”
(image: screencap, BBC)
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