The summer before covid I was in a public park campaigning for Bernie. The vast majority of interactions we had were positive. Anyway, some chunky white Gen Xer came up to me while he was sucking down a vanilla ice cream cone and started ranting about how he was a chemist and climate change was fake. I remembered something Bill Nye said once, and asked this guy why Venus was hotter than Mercury, despite Venus being farther from the sun. (Answer: a shitload of C02 in the atmosphere.) The guy could not answer and soon left. The question clearly bothered him a great deal.
Obviously you have to take my word for all of this. I know it's also oozing with liberalism, but I mended many of my evil ways the following summer.
I've always wondered about this. Is it just a matter of what people pay attention to? Like, they don't pay attention to who they tell which story, so they just don't remember? Or do some people just have better memory? The latter seems kinda disturbing...
We're creatures of habit and we love walking down that worn path. This becomes very apparent as we get older. I spent time doing the caregiver thing around elderly people for a few years and it was very much like groundhog day.