live .taticflikr.com "End of the Day" VD 177707

“Marta, you look so sad, as if the world were coming to an end,” said Mom many times when I was young.

Young? At least I had a future. And the sun had billions of years to endure before imploding, and by that time we’d have invented ways to survive beyond that.

These days, “The future” as we think of it could easily end in less than a decade.

It evolved for the youngest generations already, because for the first time in a long time the quality of their lifestyles will not equal or surpass their parents’. In other words, the American Dream is dead for most of them, victims of the economy and their college debt, if they chose to invest in a future that now entails drudgery rather than inspiring pursuits. 

Education as a ladder? Oh well. Literacy is eroding as is the value placed on it. Illiterate people are being chosen to govern us.

And so Enlightenment values, the basis of the founding of this country, are eroding. The consequences of that also assail us.

Nature and culture alike are on the skids.

If the Biden government were to “effectively” respond to the UN Committee report released this week, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)  (a summary of its contents for policymakers is at https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf), they would publicize a list of immediate actions we all must take to extend our existence beyond the next few years, after which the Earth is predicted to become uninhabitably warm. But politics intervenes even though the End of the World is surely something more exigent. At this crucial point, with the economy reeling and conservative extremism challenging moderate politics-as-usual, declaring a climate emergency would alienate voters of all stripes but especially conservative ones. 

But there is a crucial climate emergency, Joe & co. Each one of our lifestyles should drastically change, from corporate to individual. Turn off the heat and the smokestacks. Writ large, drastic change must sacrifice the present to the Future. The advent of the omniscient Bot won’t change things, even with its store of Everything We Know, even with all of Its suggested syntheses, brilliant or not.

An immediate to-do list must be generated and followed, no kidding. Austerity for all of us, even billionaires, in every way. 

Otherwise, the Future is caput.

If I were young, I’d be very, very mad.

 

(image from FLICKR)

It all started, this thought stream, when I put down the book on possible outcomes of the inevitable cataclysm and also put aside an invitation to a free barbecue at an upscale senior community recruiting new residents. One was too sad and the other bordering on cop-out escapism for a lifelong activist. 

Remember the energy, enthusiasm, and promise we all used to associate with youth? I thought. Have the Republicans and the super-rich successfully undone the dawning of the youth cult that began in the 1960s? When Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960, since Nixon represented a continuation of the Eisenhower era, it was a victory of youth over the old age that the vacation president typified. Ushered in by the second-youngest US president in history, the sixties proceeded to glorify youth in every way. But by the end of the decade, after putting a man on the moon, we were sending our youth off to die in Vietnam. Did the youth cult begin to die then? At the end of the decade that finally put Nixon, JFK’s foil, into office to prolong the Vietnam war, which youth vehemently protested against? Or did its slow demise just begin, exacerbated by the Powell manifesto and culminating in the prophesied cataclysm to be brought on by climate change and nuclear annihilation? How do we view our youth these days? After 60 years, do we pity them as those who will confront head on the cataclysm? Why is there such a gerontocracy in Washington? With the average age of members of Congress around 60 and the height of the pecking order largely around 80? Is it because youth are so held back by the constraints of a strangling economy? SCOTUS, despite the median chronological age of its “Injustices,” constitutes an ideological gerontocracy.

The death of most everything that youth used to imply is one symptom of a dying world, I guessed.  Al Gore, source of the quote in this article’s title, persists in holding out hope. Reduce the carbon emissions level to net zero by 2050, he says, and there is hope that the ultimate extinction won’t occur. He maintains this optimism “mainly because of young people all over the world now demanding change—including Greta Thunberg.”

Youth activism persists, then, reminding us of the sixties spirit. And people are still donating children to the population though the birthrates at home and worldwide have substantially declined. The children I know directly are being raised as if into the same world as I was, as my daughter was, taking a uniform future for granted.

And so, it seems, each time a wanted child is born, hope is reborn. I can’t put that aside, nor the dream that something will come along—an idea, a fix, to turn this all around. Destruction implies its inverse and I’ll never stop waiting for it to arrive.