My Baby Boomer peers and I grew up in an age where our society saw its very existence as under threat of an apocalyptic catastrophe in the form of an all out nuclear war. American government at all levels and corporate America had an interest in making citizens aware just how dire the threat was. A vigorous national response to this threat depended on a widespread recognition of the catastrophic consequences of inaction. Vast resources needed to be reallocated, and new institutions needed to be established to mobilize that response. That required a national consensus.
The national response rose to the level that approached those that had previously only been associated with mobilizing for all out warfare. So it became known as the Cold War. The threat of imminent annihilation became a dominant theme throughout American Popular Culture in the 1950s and early 1960s.
We Baby Boomers grew up in an America dominated by a culture of fear, where militarism was presented as our only path to national salvation. I believe this dour dark militaristic vision of the future was rejected by America's youth in the 1960s as they embraced the Counter-Culture that challenged many of the underlying assumptions that the Cold War was constructed on.
Today in 2012we are facing an even arguably more dire threat from Anthropogenic Catastrophic Climate Change. Our species has embarked on an epic experiment by fundamentally changing the chemistry of our planet's atmosphere, and its oceans. We have little understanding of the consequences that the process of cascading changes we have set in motion are likely to to impose on our decedents.
Our patterns of energy use are creating monumental challenges for our decedents that we currently have little comprehension of, or concern for. Why?
Our Government and Corporate America have not responded to this new threat with the same urgency that they did at the start of the Cold War. Powerful entrenched interests see changes to our patterns of energy use as an imminent threat to their wealth and and pervasive influence over our government.
This elite group's greed and short term interests are what's REALLY important in a society organized around serving those with the most money. That is what has to change.