If you had been born into a slaveholding family in Alabama 200 years ago, you would have been born and raised into a system where slavery was completely unquestioned and your community brainwashing required that slavery be considered a virtuous institution. 

There would have been no place for a citizen in such a community to protest. 

That mindset of one human able to purchase and command another human died hard in a bloody war.

What is happening today is no different except the asserted privilege is not associated with racial superiority. It's associated with temporal superiority. A belief that the people alive today have the right to consume the experience of people in the future. 

If I ask people today to desist from flying overseas for non-essential reasons ....... we will all recognize that there is no place to ask this question in American society. 

There is no place to discuss the tradeoff between the pleasure of the traveler today vs the consequence of the several tons of CO2 per passenger that will contribute to a deeper and deeper hole for future society to crawl out of. 

In hindsight, we can clearly see that history showed the slaveholders to be the villains. Those who died in the Civil War died not from something they invented, but from something they inherited. 

Diving deeply into this issue has caused me to question what it means to love our children and whether most of us really are able to love our children. 

It seems that many people are not able to see others, including their children, as being more than an extension of themselves. 

So, instead of seeing a child as an independent human being, they are simply objects in the mind of the parent which are an extension of their paternal accomplishment or perhaps a useful survival life ally to themselves. If we REALLY saw our children, we would think about that portion of their lives that they will live after we were gone. And if we gave it any thought whatsoever, it would be obvious to us that we should reduce our consumption. 

So, this seems to be the big lie that we should get out in the open. Most human beings don't really love anyone, including their children, to the extent that we define love to exclude the right to destroy the future of those we love. 

That's the American Boomer norm. Devoid of love and inventing stories of their virtue just like those Alabama slaveholders 200 years ago.