It’s the result of growing up under 2 very different impending calamities. Nuclear annihilation was a constant but invisible threat that promised to wipe the world clean before you would even have time to comprehend what was happening, so the mentality was to live in the moment and pretend it didn’t exist, because it all might not tomorrow. While climate change is a constant but blatantly visible threat that clearly gets worse and worse as time goes on, giving a real sense of desperate urgency to do something now.
So you have a dissonance of the older generations who shrug their shoulders at the horrors of the news and pretend that nothing’s happening because it doesn’t immediately affect them, and the younger generations who are freaking out about everything all at the same time because their whole lives they’ve basically been on the train tracks watching the train come barreling towards them and begging the older folks to just drive the car off the tracks.
It’s the result of growing up under 2 very different impending calamities. Nuclear annihilation was a constant but invisible threat that promised to wipe the world clean before you would even have time to comprehend what was happening, so the mentality was to live in the moment and pretend it didn’t exist, because it all might not tomorrow. While climate change is a constant but blatantly visible threat that clearly gets worse and worse as time goes on, giving a real sense of desperate urgency to do something now.
So you have a dissonance of the older generations who shrug their shoulders at the horrors of the news and pretend that nothing’s happening because it doesn’t immediately affect them, and the younger generations who are freaking out about everything all at the same time because their whole lives they’ve basically been on the train tracks watching the train come barreling towards them and begging the older folks to just drive the car off the tracks.