Trump-Biden, climate change, war, AI, housing add to worries | Commentary - The Post and Courier

Trump-Biden, climate change, war, AI, housing add to worries | Commentary | postandcourier.com

People say Generation Z is a generation of anxiety. Prima facie, I say they should get a grip. They are self-indulgent, self-absorbed and spoiled — just like every other generation.

Yet, they reflect a much broader societal anxiety. It isn’t confined to those on the threshold of their lives. I would highlight five causes of this anxiety: the presidential election, climate change, fear of wider war in Europe and Middle East, effect of AI on everything and the worsening housing shortage.

The election weighs on all these issues. There is a feeling that the nation is headed for a train wreck, no matter who wins.

President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump are known quantities. And there’s the rub. Biden is an old man who has failed to convey strength against either Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the pro-Russia movement in Congress. He has led on climate change but has been unable to use the bully pulpit of his presidency and lay out, with clear and convincing rhetoric, where the nation should be headed and how he will lead it there. And if his health should further deteriorate, there is the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over.

Trump, convicted Thursday on 34 felony counts, inspires that part of the electorate that makes up his base, primarily working people who have a sense of loss and disgruntlement. They really believe Trump will miraculously mend their world.

More reprehensible are those members of the Republican Party who are scared of Trump, who have hitched their wagon to his star because they fear him and love holding on to power at any price. You will know them by their refusal to acknowledge the last election was honest and/or to commit to accepting the result of the next election. In doing this, they are supporting a silent platform of insurrection.

The heat of summer has arrived early, and it is not the summer of our memories, of gentle winds, warm sun and wondrous beaches. The sunshine of summer has turned into an ugly, frightening harbinger of a future climate that won’t support the life we have known. Before May was over, heat and related tornados took lives and spread destruction across Texas and elsewhere.

The wars in Europe and the Middle East are troubling in new ways, ways beyond the carnage, the incalculable suffering and the buildings and homes fallen to bombs and shells. Surely, as the Russians marched into Ukraine, they will march on unless they are stopped. Who will stop them? Isolationism has a U.S. constituency it hasn’t had for 90 years.

In the Middle East, a war goes on, suffering is industrial and relentless in its awful volume, and the dangers of a broader conflict have grown exponentially.

Artificial intelligence is undermining our ability to contemplate the future. It is so vast in its possibilities, so unknown even to its aficionados, and such a threat to jobs and veracity that it is like a frontier of old where people feared there were demons living. Employment will change, and the battle for the truth against the fake will be epic.

Finally, there is housing: the quiet crisis that saps expectations. But the political class is so busy with its own housekeeping that it has lost sight of the need for solutions.

This is, ultimately, the decade of anxiety, mainly because it is a decade in which we feel we are losing what we had. It's time for us to get a grip.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.