Naming the ones in school now

We give each generation a name, and the names are blunt instruments. Nobody born in a particular year agreed to think a particular way.

Still, the labels earn their keep. Their real use is to remind whoever is doing the naming that the world does not look the same from every age.

Which raises a question about the children in secondary school now, in Assiut or anywhere else. What should they be called?

I would name them after what they are being handed. They have grown up hearing that the summers will keep getting hotter, that the river is under strain, that things bought cheaply are paid for somewhere else by someone else. For them, the cost to the planet is not a topic. It is the lens. Every purchase, every job offer and every brand that wants their attention will be read through it, quietly, by the people who will be the main customers in fifteen years.

That is a heavy inheritance, and they did not ask for it.

But something else is true of them. They find each other easily. A girl in Assiut who cares about the plastic along the river can, within a week, be talking with dozens of others in towns she has never visited, and the group outlasts the conversation. A generation that grew up connected may turn out to be unusually good at acting together, and at looking after one another while it does.

I find that hopeful. They did not choose the weight they are carrying, and they may well be the ones who carry it furthest.