In the '50s, there was some sense of generosity and hope, generosity in America and generosity among the poets. But once Nixon and others got in the White House, especially Reagan, they bankrupted the country, put it in hock so that there's no money for these major efforts. Let's say mass transit, or clean energy, or large scale medical treatment for addicts or even alcoholics, or to solve the problems that were created by the wars, by the disdaining, the neglect of the infrastructure of the cities, and the neglect of the clean-up of the poison wastes everywhere left by industrial sites and even the neglect of the final disposal of nuclear waste. Science needs toilet-training and it never got that. It would be expensive.
Nuclear science needs toilet-training certainly.
Among other problems, when they emptied out the mental hospitals the rationale was to build inner city places for housing the mentally ill so they wouldn't be rotting vegetables in the back wards, but would have some interaction in the society. So that by now, many of the problems we saw in the fifties have become almost impossible to deal with. That's why you have all this apathy among the younger generation or so-called apathy or slacker. I don't think that it's real apathy. I think that the press and the government and the corporations have blockaded the amelioration of the situation that might still take place.