Monday, January 5, 2015

Boomers : self indulgent, self centred - or a generation from whom great things are expected ?

Well, fellow Boomers - its 'do or die' time - literally.

Because some of us actually are --- dying of old age, having enjoyed our full three score and ten.

And as for "Never trust The Man" (or The Woman) or anyone over thirty : we are all well well over thirty -- even the very youngest of us is over fifty.

We run the world - as prime ministers, CEOs, generals, publishing magnates - we own its wealth - we hold its tenures and its Nobel Prizes, write its most widely read daily columns and books-for-thinking people.

That great thing of which it was long expected we were to do : its here, been here, is almost gone.

Its 'deciding the fate of the world' - for now and forever.

Great enough a thing for ya ?

We can stop and reverse - NOW ! - the ever increasing amount of human carbon waste we are pouring into the sky - stop the rush to an irreversible tipping point and climate meltdown - or do nothing.

Or worse - we can help throw a few more coals on the barbie/bier.

We can make a terrible crisis even worse by listening, once again, to our childhood teachers, our TV sets, all those upbeat books and magazine articles from our childhood .

All those lies about how the Manhattan nuclear Project won the war, that it is now providing us energy too cheap to meter and how it can be a future model for big bold plans to change the shape of the earth and the shape of the weather.

(Today we call it geo-engineering, but back then it was called just plain civil engineering : for example, plans to melt both Poles with nukes, changing the weather --- and then farming the results.

That was just a proposal - meanwhile the Manhattan nuclear Project had changed our weather ; now those once so cheerful April showers  glowed in the dark all over the world --- filled with baby-killing strontium 90 fallout. Oh joy !)

So even as little bitty boomer kids we knew a different tale : we fully understood that the helplessness felt by the hero of the film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers got 1950s reality just about right.

We knew the Manhattan natural penicillin project that saved our baby sister wasn't made from coal tar, air and water like Man-made nylon and DDT all the other things the chemists were always dreaming up.

It and dozens of other marvellous life-saving antibiotics were made naturally - made by some of the smallest, weakest beings in existence.

Made definitely by the moral lowest of the low, the 4Fs of the 4Fs of the natural world : bottom-of-the-barrel smelly slime oozing in the dankest darkest corners of our collective basements.

We kids had learned if we held our noses and checked our gap and morality reflexes and worked with the slimiest part of Nature, instead of against it like the nuke boys, good things happened to good and bad children alike.

So what is it going to be boomers : Door #1 --- geo-nuke the world, all to save it ?

Or door #2 ----accepting nature as having an equal right with humans to co-exist on this planet and take a little advice from their 3.5 billion year success story at surviving on this planet ???

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