We're starting to be in charge now, and I'm getting scared. Before, I used to be mad, because other people were in charge and they were messing it all up--but now I'm in my forties, and my Gen-X peers are heading into positions of power all around me. Even the incoming President of the United States is (gasp) only negligibly older than me! So now, I have the genuine terror of the responsible adult, the fear of one who knows how the people in power think, what world events have shaped our lives and our opinions. And in my opinion, we could be trouble.

It's all around us, alarms going off, politicians admitting to a "planet in peril," banners proclaiming "Climate Change Crisis!" And society is changing in response: big box stores with organic pajamas, an overabundance of help-save-the-earth websites where you can "take action today" with a mere click of the mouse. Hybrid cars, local food initiatives, and eco-projects abound. The cultural conversation has advanced to "how" instead of "if." Our new executive branch seems to really "get it," in a way unimaginable just one year ago. I can walk around my small liberal town reading the flyers or wander around the virtual world and fill myself up with hope: look at all these people working for change, my heart sings. Then I look out the window of the organic tea house and see the SUVs jockeying for position in the parking lot of Whole Foods, and my blood returns to its sluggish crawl through the chambers.

My job as a hospice nurse requires me to drive around and go into many people's homes, so I see a broad cross-section of my local community intimately. And what I see, besides the beauty and strangeness of human experience, is cars cars cars, and consume consume consume. Without my job, I would live in the hopeful world comprised of my children's alternative public school and my progressive small town with its majority-liberal city council. Without my job it would be easy to forget just how many people use Cheetos and Cokes as a meal substitute. Without my job it would be easy to pretend that reality TV doesn't push uncivil behavior and ever more-consumptive lifestyles into the living rooms of people in all socioeconomic conditions. So sure, the word is out there, but when I venture outside my bubble, it can feel like no one is listening. And why should we? It's depressing, and it makes us feel powerless, and so we search our psyches for some comfort. And there's just no denying that denial is comfortable.

My generation is uniquely trained to believe that nothing bad will happen, at least not the things we're told to fear. We grew up under the back-and-white specter of the Evil Empire, the threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union hanging over our lives, and then just as we came toward an age where we might gain a slightly more sophisticated understanding of Cold War politics, poof! The Iron Curtain fell aside to reveal… nothing, it seemed. A collapsed economy and lines of people waiting for bread in the snow, as if the terrible threat we'd grown up with had been nothing more than a shell game, the joke's on us with our overstocked grocery stores and overinflated military budget.

A decade later, we prepared for the first "real" crisis of our adult lives. Sure, there had been a war in there, but wasn't it mostly on TV, and didn't we win without much hassle? The war seemed like a faraway blip compared to the imminent collapse of infrastructure predicted for Y2K. Remember Y2K? How we were all told to stock up on food and have backup heat sources and emergency plans in place? And remember how we woke up on January 1, 2000, to discover that during the night, the massive breakdown of computer systems simply never happened? All that worry, hysteria really, and…nothing happened.

The biggest event in this country that has touched my generation was September 11, the one thing we had no warning about, at least no widely broadcasted media coverage warning us that a threat was coming and we needed to act. No pamphlets with instructions on how to build a bomb shelter, no groups chartering boats well-stocked with food and weapons to wait out the electronic collapse of modern society (I really know people who did this for Y2K). For us, real threat comes without public preamble.

So now all that's on the news is climate change, and we're the ones who are supposed to be fired up and doing something about it. We've lived just enough years to have a hint that the weather really is different than when we were younger, but not old enough to be sure, as we were children during those snowier winters and less buggy summers. And what our experience has taught us is that foreknowledge and fantasy are interrelated, the monster we see approaching mutates into a chimera. So why worry so much? We can hide in the thought that somehow, just maybe the idea of "global warming" is like the "energy shortage" we had a few years back, an invention of corporate greed, a fear planted to maximize profits.

It's an elegant trick, how we can both believe that nothing is happening and believe that something might be happening but enough is being done. When we feel anxious, we can charge a donation to an environmental group, or even take one-click action ourselves without leaving the office, fire off a petition to save the polar bears before we drive back home. And we can keep hoping that if we just wait it out, the scientists will figure it out, and nothing will happen. After all, it's happened before.