If there’s anything more useless, and more energy-draining, than getting offended when someone says “OK, Boomer,” I couldn’t tell you what it is.
“OK, Boomer” is, as far as I can tell, a dismissive put-down of people my age. It’s certainly not a compliment, and it’s certainly not a general acknowledgement of our keen insight and superior perspective on the modern world.
But whether or not we want to admit it, we do tend to be condescending and hypercritical of those people, commonly known as Millennials and Generation Z’ers, who, we believe, lack our worldly viewpoints.
What do we say about them? We say “everybody has to get a trophy,” or “everybody’s on the honor roll these days.” They think they’ve done something smashingly successful, and we come along to minimize their accomplishments with comments that sound strangely like “get off my lawn.”
All of which makes us no better than we thought the members of the “Greatest Generation,” were. They called us soft, too. We didn’t know anything, and couldn’t do anything right. When we were old enough to understand the realities of being sent to some country half a world away to fight and die in a war, we pitched a fit that lasted for the entire second half of the 1960s and into the 1970s.
We were told that we didn’t live through World War II, that we had no perspective on what it was like to be faced with the overwhelming task of defeating European Fascism, and to follow that up by pushing back against Communist hegemony.
I can still hear my father, watching a Vietnam protest on the news.
“You think they’d allow that in Russia?” he’d ask, glaring at me.
“No, Dad, I’m sure they wouldn’t,” I’d answer, with condescending patience. “That’s why we’re not Russia. We’re not supposed to stifle dissent in this country.”
That would only aggravate him more, because he knew I was right — in theory. But not in the realpolitik of the world as it was in the 1960s. To him, we were striking a blow for Communism and against the flag. There was no winning.
I suspect we weren’t the only family having these generational arguments. Wasn’t one of the “memes” back then “don’t trust anyone over 30?” We weren’t any easier on our elders than Millennials and Gen Z’ers are on us. Be it ever thus.
For the record, though, it should be noted that the Baby Boomers contributed both good and not-so-good to the world.
While there have always been pacifists and environmentalists, and those who strove for social justice, Boomers helped make all three much more acceptable in the mainstream (funny using words such as “social justice” and “acceptable” as if they’re oxymorons, but those were the times).
Perhaps it was our fear of getting blown up in a Vietnam jungle, and perhaps those fears made our pacifism somewhat expedient, but the result, I think, was to make everyone more aware of war and its futility. History has proven not enough people have become aware of this, but we certainly made inroads. I also like to think we Boomers took up the gauntlet thrown down to us by Rachel Carson in the book “Silent Spring” when it came to the environment. Also, we came of age as the civil rights movement was exploding, and many of us took up that cause, too. Not all of us, but enough of us so that some progress was made on that front. Again, as with war, we didn’t make nearly enough progress. But as much as common sense tells you that these things should be self-evident, sadly they are not. The wheels of progress turn slowly.
But for all our perceived nobility, we can stop congratulating ourselves any time now. We were also in on the ground floor of a glut of consumerism and materialism that has done much to destroy us. And I fear we are just as much authors of a growing coldness and hostility toward that which we either don’t experience firsthand or we don’t understand, as we are authors of a time where awareness was blooming all around us; and that the resulting chasm is where the disconnect that manifests itself in our widely polarizing political situation lies today.
So here we are. Have our technological advances been all that helpful? Or have they created a much more dangerous world where you can’t even go to the bank without worrying that your account will be compromised?
Has our generation made it more difficult for those who came after us to avail themselves of what we took for granted? I think sometimes the answer to these questions is yes.
So when we’re greeted with the dismissive “OK, Boomer” it’s just a case of turnabout being fair play. We deserve some of that … and we certainly were right there 50 years ago when we were young and our parents tried, in vain, to understand us.
