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 ???

Sustaining our climate disaster : 'talkin' about my generation' --- the hyper-active Rogue Boomers ruining our planet, with our passive help

True : we didn't start the fire - blame the beginnings of our carbon burning frenzy on our parents, grandparents and great great great grandparents.

But we are the generation in charge now - in fact the generation in charge when the global (rather than local) dangers of the Big Smoke first became apparent to all but those of closed minds.

So the responsibility for ruining paradise is really upon us, the Boomer Generation - those of us born roughly between the early mid Forties and the early mid Sixties.

We'll be the ones still in charge when the CO2 and elevated temperature levels rise so high they tip us into irreversible disaster.

Most of us - in fairness - believe in human induced climate disaster and worry what can be done.

But we worry and fret so completely passively that we might as well not even show up o to be weighed on the moral scales.

Meanwhile some of us Boomers are moral monsters - hardly sleeping or taking vacations we are so busy thinking of new ways to dig up, transport and burn ever more carbon, ever faster.

These rogue Boomers run countries as Prime Ministers, Presidents and Dictators (pardon my redundancies), run big international corporations, run big international media empires.

But they are a minority - albeit a very active and self confident minority - and they only get away with it because we in the vast Boomer silent majority let them, all because we hold our own convictions so lightly and feebly.

They - the rogue Boomers - privately admit, in their heart of hearts, that human carbon emissions are changing the climate.

But they remain (both publicly - and much more crucially, privately) convinced that real world human engineering can quickly, cheaply, easily overcome any problems that the egghead scientists in their ivory tower labs can detect.

Yet another postwar Manhattan Project will solve any problem.

Telling indeed that the people most convinced of the efficiency of WWII bureaucracy were the ones who never personally suffered through it's chickenshit, to use the words of Paul Fussell, who did know of it first hand.

I would say it was the youngest of the young adults from the WWII - those too junior to know of the mid level real world frustrations - together with all those too young to know much (or anything) personally of WWII.

They are the ones who fell hardest for the carefully cultivated postwar myth of the efficiency of the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's secretive, un-democratic, throw big money at any problem approach.

That meant almost everyone in the  postwar world born after 1920 initially bought into Vannevar Bush's Big Lie.

Over time, personal experiences with postwar bureaucratic failures and revelations about what really went on in WWII converted many us to becoming a Doubting Thomas about the touted advantages of another Manhattan (nuclear) Project type operation to solve anything.

But clearly the rogue Boomers (in terms of personality: action-oriented unreflective, shallow types) never got the memo : because most never ever read a book - or ever changed their mind - after college.

What I think I can bring to the effort to fight to save our climate before it is too late is all the research work I have done on the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's little-known alter ego : the Manhattan (penicillin) Project.

It was everything - in almost every detail - that the nuclear project was not and so it offers, I believe, a way out of our climate dilemma ....

1945: Janus Manhattan's legacy for Boomer kids - the paths of nuclear death or penicillin life.

Now which path they take to deal with (or not to deal with) climate change will decide the fate of all of us

1945 : discoveries perfected in ever janus-like Manhattan had helped end the war on a high note.

Now those discoveries (the Manhattan nuclear Project and the Manhattan penicillin Project) presented the children about to form the Boomer Generation two warring choices about how best to deal with physical reality.

The old way - as personified by the non-democratic way of the A-Bomb effort. The way of Modernity, The Enlightenment and The Plenticide : overpowering Nature to force it to do Man's will.

The new way - as presented by the tiny teams working to develop natural penicillin freely sharing information (and penicillium spores) amongst themselves. The way of postModernity, of global commensality and acceptance of plentitude. Working with, not against, Nature so there was a future for humanity on a shared vibrantly green planet.

2015 : now these boomer kids are in charge, the boss.

As world leaders, as voters, our major wealth holders, in senior positions everywhere.

Their decision now on climate change (choosing door one - the top down secretive violent ways of the a-bomb project) (or choosing door two - the open democratic ways of the natural penicillin project) will decide all our fates.....

"Janus Manhattan" : home to both wartime's synthetic plutonium death-dealing and to natural penicillin lifesaving

Why write fictions about Manhattan --- when its real life is so much more exciting than anything Hollywood screenwriters could ever dream up ?

What cautious Hollywood studio boss is ever going to greenlight a fictional script that sets up the Nash Garage Building at Manhattan's 133rd Street and 3280 Broadway as the wartime home of the death-delivering technology that produced almost all of the world's nuclear weapons and the Lutheran Hospital at Manhattan's 144th Street and 343 Covent Ave as the birthplace of the push for providing lifesaving penicillin for all ?

Janus Manhattan : home to both Gordon Gekko and Emily Lazarus

It all seems to be too neat and too cosy a location for such a monumental clash of human values : to set this cosmic clash in two small buildings half a mile from each other, two buildings that are within sight of each other from their top floors.

But it actually happened that way - the same tiny space , the same brief moment in time : the Summer of 1943 : working to producing endless Little Boy death bombs versus working to save the life of one little baby girl named Patty Malone.

I suppose - pace Tom Wolfe the younger -Manhattan fiction allows an author to gild the lilly.

 But first you must start with really beautiful lillies.

And non-fictional Manhattan has them in buckets ...