Turning to Hope

I can’t think of a single redemptive anthem for the youthful idealism of Rachel Carson’s firstborn children. Even U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” was a nostalgic song about Dr. King’s assassination, a requiem for a certain kind of innocence. Instead, the culture’s most gifted pop prophets retreated into irony, satire and nihilism. Detailed, nuanced, stinging critiques of the status quo became the stuff of nightly network TV – The Simpsons, for example, annihilating the global-scale pieties of the overconsumptive new world order, Seinfeld meticulously cataloguing the amoral self-absorption of small-scale contemporary life – but the powers that be merely lumbered on in their fossil-fuelled way. Ferocious proselytizers like Nirvana, Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine brought apocalyptic agitprop and bilious contempt for authority to Top 40 radio, but still the times they weren’t a-changin’. Sustainability – climate change’s counterpoint, the base measure by which a thing could be determined to be part of the solution – should have become the rallying cry of the age, the point of unity for everyone from anti-globalization street protesters to the savers of whales, the means by which we would overcome. It became, instead, a corporate buzzword. ...