People are short sighted generally. If something doesn’t effect them currently or the effects are said to be far off or only in specific circumstances it’s sort of normal to go “ok, that sounds not good… but if I don’t go to work right now I’ll miss rent. I’ll come back to that later.” And they never come back to it for whatever variety of reasons from exhaustion to some sort of mental block on wanting to read horrible shit.

The solution for this short sightedness is having people whose entire job in life to bend society in a way to avoid things like climate change or to maintain rights like abortion. The problem with that in a capitalist system is avoiding negative effects of climate change might not be profitable. So that person, to whatever extent they exist, is ignored and undermined. We end up with this totally alienated population of people who broadly do want abortion to be legal, who do want to force corporations to reign in carbon emissions to avoid further catastrophic consequences in the climate but they lack power. Everyone is distracted by their own bullshit, all this abstract (to them) stuff about dying due to no access to abortion is driven to the fringe of the consciousness. The worse everything gets, the more it feels bad to think about climate change or starving homeless or whatever else. Simultaneously people are having their housing security threatened by raising rent, raising grocery prices, etc. It’s all just shoving people into shutting down, ignoring, and just letting hell wash over us all.