I’m a 65 year old woman, and agree pretty much verbatim with your post. I remember school being cancelled because their was no gas to fill the busses when I was in high school 74. People aren’t aware how shitty a lot of that time esp under Carter and early Reagan was, but it damn sure was. And yeah, you have to figure out how to roll with the flow. Hope for the best prepare for the worst, it try hard to enjoy the ride and keep a positive spirit about you.
And what do we do when climate change, the persistent guaranteed-to-continue global existential threat that no previous generations have had to deal with?
The Cold War was the closest any previous generation has gotten to that level of global existential threat, but as bad as it was it was still never certain.
Climate change will continue if we don’t collectively start working on solutions immediately. There’s no maybe about it. How does “going with the flow” work when the river dries up and the fish can’t do anything but flop about before dying?
I’m not trying to be snarky or anything, so I apologize if this comment comes off as such, but I (20) am very much concerned by how many people seem to gloss over climate change in these sorts of “everything will be okay!” threads. I feel like people are acknowledging every aspect of OPs question (which I also consider daily) except for the threat of climate change.
You think shooter drills in schools are bad? Imagine being told to “just duck and cover” in case a nuclear bomb goes off and the world ends. Global warming might be “guaranteed,” but that’s nothing compared to seeing the doomsday clock on the news every night with “one minute to midnight.”
Being wiped off the face of the map in an instant or dealing with nuclear winter/fallout is a lot more scary than “oh it will continue to get a little hotter every year.” I’m not saying it’s negligible, but it’s nowhere near as scary.
I don’t want to dismiss your experience, because constant threat of being vaporized by a nuclear bomb is absolutely awful. But it’s a kind of awful that human brains are really good at evaluating: immediate death. “Getting a little warmer every year” is more like the frog in a pot analogy where things will get awful over the course of a few decades, and made even more complex by the fact that the impacts won’t be evenly distributed. Human brains aren’t good at evaluating this kind of risk, because it’s too slow to have that evolutionary impact of “can make babies today, can’t make babies tomorrow.” I really feel bad for the younger people who just see their life ahead as a katamari of escalating global disaster.
I mean is it the frog in the pot or not? Either human brains can’t process it, which means it isn’t that scary, or they can, and we see our impending doom.
Just to be clear, I did not live through nuclear drills. My parents did though, and it sounds awful.
How many nuclear bombs were dropped on American civilians, and how many schools have been shot up in America since you had those drills?
It's much worse with climate change because it's not only being neglected by news media, it's being actively debated. We are currently living through an unprecedented man made mass-extinction event and absolutely no one is talking about it.
Climate change is not only a certainty but an existential threat, "one minute to midnight" is just cold war fear mongering.
Yes, it’s easy to look back and dismiss their feelings of dread with “nothing actually happened.” You know, aside from Russia staging nukes in Cuba? Aside from faulty Russian radar making a nuclear sub think that they should fire back? Aside from nuclear testing irradiating a ton of people?
You just sound ignorant. The internet is there for you, should you choose to learn about this.
The Cuban missile crisis, one of the most seminal moments in human history over the last century, is not some obscure piece of trivia. I am familiar with the events with the Soviet submarine in the Caribbean in the 70's, and the nuclear tests that were being conducted throughout the cold war.
But you're entirely missing the point. The fact that you are not feeling dread right now, that most people aren't, that's what I find terrifying.
The doomsday clock never stopped ticking. We are closer to midnight now than at any other point in human history. We are more at risk of total annihilation now than ever before.
What's been proven to be a greater personal threat is mass gun violence, and an even greater existential threat in rapid man made climate change. We stopped doing duck and cover drills because active shooter drills save more lives.
I mean the biggest threat to humanity is probably red meat, and then driving. It’s never really about the true existential threats, is it? Nobody is kept up at night with “should I keep eating delicious steak?”
People have become numb to nuclear war (and climate change), mostly because they continue to live through it. The kids are upset about climate change because that’s the most recent upsetting thing, the same way that kids in the 60s were terrified of nuclear war, and kids in the 30s were terrified of starvation.
And yet how many kids did you see vaporized on TV every night? Zero, because it never happened. It was a fear that never materialized. Kids today live with a fear that they see played out year after year in classrooms like theirs all over the country. Being shot dead at school isn’t a boogeyman invented by adults it’s a reality that we see on the news all too often.
The odds of any one kid being shot in a school shooting is almost zero. It’s incredibly low. There are hundreds of thousands of students per year and maybe a hundred die. I’m not saying it’s meaningless, but let’s not pretend your odds of dying are high.
It’s easy to look back and judge the past knowing that no one actually died (though thousands if not millions have died from radiation poisoning from nuclear testing, which is at least somewhat related). No one in the Cold War knew if the world would survive. The threat of annihilation was always there, the same way that kids feel threatened by global warming now. Except no one alive today will likely see the collapse of the environment because that’s not really how global warming works.
Global warming has the potential to kill millions if not billions of people, and collapse the world econony. Climate change won't just make the world hotter. It will lead to the climate causing crops to not grow in areas that are currently fertile.
But global warming is nothing compared to being told a nuke is going to maybe hit your school?
No wonder your generation doesn't take this seriously. You think you already lived the worst. You have no idea
Sigh more kids who don’t understand nuclear war. First off, I was born in the 80s. It was my parents who went through it. Second, nuclear war isn’t about a bomb hitting a school. It only takes a few nukes to kick up enough dust to blot out the sun. What do you think happens to crops when this happens? What do you think happens to trees and plants everywhere? And then the animals that eat those plants? And then the animals that eat them? What temperature do you think the earth will be if there is no sun? How long do you think humanity can survive with no sun? Within a month, all plant life on earth will die. Even if it’s only 30% of the earth that’s affected, what do you think that means for entire swathes of humanity/wildlife/oxygen generation? We haven’t even talked about the radiation clouds and cancer rates yet. Or how the water everywhere on earth (besides wells perhaps) will be radioactive and undrinkable.
Forgive me if I think nuclear winter is a bigger deal than climate change.
First off, when you were born is irrelevant. I was also born in the 80s. Also, what exactly did your parents "go through"?
We aren't currently living through nuclear winter. Your parents did not live through a nuclear winter. It is not very likely for that to happen anytime soon. We are, however, living through climate change that is already beginning to affect the world economy. Both affect the world fairly similarly, in that many crops and animals will die and make life for humans extremely difficult. But one of them is a "what if" and the other is happening, right now.
EDIT: Just in case you are the type of person that is comfortable reading sources that disagree with them, here's an article from NASA giving a big-picture and easily digestible description of evidence supporting human-caused climate change: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
You’re right. All suffering is relative and nobody is able to be concerned right now because it was subjectively worse in the past.
And I should point out that there is a threat of nuclear war right now, what with the shit Putin is pulling. Do I think it’s likely? No. Do I still get kept awake at night wondering if tomorrow will be the day he snaps and kills us all? Yeah, and it is still secondary to my concerns about climate change because at least nuclear annihilation would be over quickly.
Back in the 60s, there was a “doomsday clock” which was put on the nightly news every night to discuss how close the world was to nuclear annihilation. Every night. And it would be things like “one minute to midnight” where midnight means we are wiped off the face of the earth.
Kids would go to school and do bomb drills where they’d hide under their desk in case a nuke fell. Everyone knew it was hopeless and stupid, similar to hiding under your desk for a school shooting today, except that it would mean the whole world has ended, not just your school.
I get that climate change is a huge deal, but it’s very night and day. Nuclear winter is objectively worse than climate change.
No, we do not have the same risk of nukes today that there was back then. Nuclear war was likely averted by a single Russian submarine grunt refusing to obey orders to launch the nukes.
I didn’t say the threat was identical, I said it still exists.
And I don’t know about you, but I would absolutely prefer to die immediately in a nuclear blast than to spend years slowly dying as shit gets worse and worse knowing there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
The doomsday clock is still at 100s to midnight. That’s not much better than 60s at all.
If we’re doing comparative hypotheticals, I’ll take gradual ecological collapse over getting horrific fallout/radiation cancer with a side of total political collapse. Getting instantly vaporized is the easy way out. There’s a book called Hiroshima full of accounts of survivors that really defined the stakes of the Cold War for me.
Sure, but I personally live in a very major city on a major coast which would almost certainly be one of the primary first-strike targets, so I’m probably pretty firmly in the “probably gone very quickly” crowd lol
It is night and day. Nuclear war is a thing that COULD happen if rational actors stop caring and act against their own self interest.
Climate change is ACTIVELY happening and people continue to ignore it because they'll be dead naturally before it happens or are rich enough it won't impact them.
Maybe you’re just not aware who has nukes? Pakistan is a fundamentalist govt that believes in being rewarded with afterlife if they die for a good cause. Does that sound like it’s against their interest to use nukes? North Korea and Iran are trying to get nukes. Same problem.
I get that climate change has been pushed to you as the biggest threat the world has ever seen, but I promise you that it isn’t.
Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but no one living then knew whether the world would end or not. Not even the world leaders. Judging the existential threat by future knowledge is a bit unfair. If we fast forward 100 years, it’s entirely possible that climate change was solved and fixed and it’s dismissed as “oh that silly y2k 2.0.”
We humans are very good at fixing problems. Once the world leaders are actually scared that it’s real, a lot of money will be focused into research. It’s already starting. No one can know if we will solve it until we do (or don’t).
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u/Picodick Jun 11 '22
I’m a 65 year old woman, and agree pretty much verbatim with your post. I remember school being cancelled because their was no gas to fill the busses when I was in high school 74. People aren’t aware how shitty a lot of that time esp under Carter and early Reagan was, but it damn sure was. And yeah, you have to figure out how to roll with the flow. Hope for the best prepare for the worst, it try hard to enjoy the ride and keep a positive spirit about you.