Talkin' bout my generation

     I usually have no patience with those who bash the baby boom generation as the drivers of all that is bad in our culture.  I remember the late 60s and early 70s as a time of optimism.  With the Vietnam war winding down and the new consciousness of the fragility of our Spaceship earth it seemed my generation was poised to make the world a better place.  The inauguration of the first boomer president, Bill Clinton epitomized that attitude.
    Flash forward to the "tea party" revolution of 2010 and the nasty racism that undergirded the movement and the shine of the boomer babies was tarnished.  Climate change denial, the aforementioned racism and misogyny shook  my faith in boomers.  Having grown up in a small town, I knew many of my friends were raised in conservative households.  It should have been a tipoff as to how their political views would harden over the years.  Boomers made up the larges single voting bloc for the abomination now seated in the Oval Office.
     A NYT story about how the administration is systematically undermining the work done by the EPA on climate change has further undermined any defense I might make for the boomer cohort.  For every Bill McKibben who has done groundbreaking work on the menace of carbon emissions there is a James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist who has used his perch at the EPA to decree that long term assessments of global warming only extend to 2040.   As he well knows, the pace of warming will pick up drastically at that point.  He wishes to delay the story of climate change until most of his and my generation have passed from the scene.  I will be 89 in 2040 if I am still alive.  The youngest of us will be in our late 70s at that point and will probably not face the reckoning our inaction will doom our children and grandchildren to experience in the latter half of this century.
     If there is any salvation for my generation it will be in working for the defeat of the present administration and in the support of the policies which will keep the world from tipping into drastic climate change.   I hope we are up to the task.