THE FLAG, THE CROSS, AND THE STATION WAGON

The prolific writer and activist finds some of the causes of our societal meltdown in the idyllic suburbs of his youth.

“We were better consumers than citizens,” writes McKibben of his generation, the original counterculturalists who mounted rebellions against the war in Vietnam, racial injustice, and inequalities of many kinds. What happened? Well, those suburban kids took their detachments from cities and communities and extended them into the hyperindividualism of today, its governing motto “you’re not the boss of me.” McKibben capably picks apart long-ago history to find present themes. He looks deeply into the role of his hometown, Lexington, Massachusetts, in firing the revolutionary “shot heard ’round the world” only to discover that even there, slavery existed until well into the 19th century. The town may have been one of the first to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday even though it was, as McKibben writes, “overwhelmingly white,” but it was also sharply divided in climacteric moments such as the Vietnam War. The author locates many of these divisions in the present culture, many owing to the “generation that grew up in those suburbs in those years.” Sure, they may have played in the same creek and the same fields, but many of them voted for Donald Trump and have zero interest in paying higher taxes to address issues like the climate crisis. McKibben finds hope in the thought that some of his generation’s contrarian ardor can be rekindled, which is pleasing yet a little unconvincing. Even he allows, in this well-constructed narrative, that the odds are long. “For me,” he writes, “the scariest thing about the last forty years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters far more than the society an individual inhabits.”

A reasonable if perhaps quixotic plea for the boomers to rise from the couch and get back to work fixing their messes.