Yeah, instead we had our teachers reassure us that if we saw a nuclear explosion that we should hid under our desks and that would protect us. We ran drills practicing this, as if it were expected to happen any moment now.

I agree with you that it's worse these days. Now, the kids practice active shooter drills. It turns out the USSR never did launch the missiles, but kids shooting up their school is so common it barely makes the news anymore.

The example you're referencing was mentioned in the article, and I think is part of the reason Haidt took the time to prove that this phenomenon is _not_ isolated to the US, and that US specific issues (like school shootings) are unlikely to have an effect elsewhere.

> And it certainly can’t be caused by the most popular theory we hear in the USA: school shootings and other stress-inducing events. Why would school shootings or active shooter drills implemented only in the USA lead to an immediate epidemic across the entire English-speaking world?

Drills at least give you an action to do and a hope it will work out.

Meanwhile global warming propaganda does neither. There's no easy to do action and no realistic hope it will be fixed.

It surprises me that folks (presumably technical) regress to the "same thing as the old thing" logic. I'm not downplaying the end-of-times drama every generation surely went through, but whatever drill you can think of, it ended, and kids went home, and they most likely played outside. At worst they sat in front of the news which didn't have to compete with the Internet and YouTube thus was very different.

Now? They go through a drill, leave, check their phone 4,000 times between that drill and dinner time which gives them a constant stream of a) the world is terrible, b) the other side is evil, c) your peers are all better looking, smarter, richer, and more popular than you.