Pirate's Cove

Have you ever felt anxious and then realized you had yourself work up over nothing? Perhaps you had too much coffee or you’re hungover. Perhaps you’ve been eating poorly. Or skipped the gym. These are all things you’ve done to yourself, creating anxiety over nothing. Kinda like this

Climate-change anxiety is now a part of growing up. Pop culture has caught on.

The kids are anxious.

Can you blame them? In a nation inundated with news of mass shootings and the separation of migrant families, the youngest generation must also learn to cope with the debilitating knowledge that they will be the generation most affected by climate change, should it continue on the trajectory scientists believe it will take. According to a study by the American Psychological Association (APA) released in October, 58 percent of surveyed Gen Zers, ranging in age from 15 to 21 years old, reported feeling stressed by news coverage of the subject. That’s 7 percent higher than adults overall.

“Here’s this big situation that’s clearly getting worse, and that we didn’t start. We inherited it,” Lynn Bufka, associate director of practice research and policy at the APA, said of what might run through a Gen Zer’s mind. “What are we going to do?”

No, I don’t really blame the kids, I blame the idiot adults who have been pushing this doomsday cult, telling the kids that they only have 12 years to save the human race, that the seas will boil, that all the animals will die, that it will get hot and cold. What should we do about it? Move on from it. It’s fake. It’s not going to happen. But, the news media loves broadcasting Stories Of Doom (if it bleeds it leads), especially when they are part of the same Cult of Climastrology.

Seriously, many of us grew up with the specter of nuclear doom, and we did just fine. Worrying about a tiny increase of 1.5F since 1850 is a big nothingburger.

That anxiety has started to boil over into popular culture. Although movies and television have long toyed with doomsday scenarios, we’re now seeing deeper, more poignant treatments of the issue, with scenes of children and young adults trying to grapple with their fears about a fast-changing world. In the nihilistic new HBO series “Euphoria,” for instance, an anxiety-prone teen addict defends her post-rehab drug use by remarking that “the world’s coming to an end, and I haven’t even graduated high school yet.”

Last Sunday’s episode of “Big Little Lies,” which airs before “Euphoria,” included a subplot in which Amabella (Ivy George), daughter of the fiercely protective Renata Klein (Laura Dern), passes out from a panic attack while learning about climate change and sustainability.

Well, that should certainly help stabilize the kids, eh? It is pretty much child abuse at this point. And the show did this as the character learned about the Doom while in school, where teachers are programing children with this abusive doomsaying.

Independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch built much of his recent zombie movie “The Dead Don’t Die” off this apprehension. The creatures rise up because of an unsustainable human activity (the fictional “polar fracking”) that knocks the Earth off its axis. We witness a small town’s adult residents fall prey to zombies one by one, their attackers a representation of the relative apathy humankind has exhibited toward serious issues such as the world’s destruction. The only glimmer of hope resides in a juvenile detention center, where a few of the town’s youngest residents express concern about what’s happening to the planet.

Well, hey, I love a good zombie book (reading one right now, though it is not that good, but too far in to quit), but I understand they are fake. Even when the premise is that they were created by biological weapons research, I know it ain’t happening, and do not feel anxious. Nor should kids feel that way because of idiocy about fracking causing the earth to come off its axis and creating zombies. Dumb.

That sense of resignation is explored in Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed,” nominated for best original screenplay at the Oscars earlier this year. The film is, as Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday put it, an “austere drama of one man’s apocalyptic crisis of faith.” The story is prompted by the suicide of an anguished eco-activist whose wife was pregnant and who had worried about bringing a child into an ecologically doomed world.

These people are just insane, and should be kept away from children.

But, hey, we can fix this all with a tax, you know.