You don't fear anything. You've been anaesthetized. But it was who we were then. Most middle-class Americans never entirely leave their adolescence. It may be because, in America, we can afford it.
Adolescence is a luxury.
And it's good for business. Business not only supports adolescence, it fosters it. To a significant extent, business lives off it. Our own adolescence has been so shrewdly and deliberately marketed on such a stupendous scale that it has become our national ideology. The poem is set in 1962.