Okay Boomer (And Kids)

Back when I was growing up, in the '60s and early '70s there was something called "The Generation Gap".

The Baby Boom Generation (those born from 1946 to 1964) were becoming young adults, and man, they were rebelling against the older generation with their rules, regulations, and morals-everything that was keeping them from being "free". Which generally meant the liberty for taking as many drugs as they wanted and having as much sex a person could possibly have.

Other things were going on too, of course. There was the Vietnam War. You kids have no idea what a big deal the Vietnam War was. There were protests. There were songs. Our Presidents, while they were not as, um, unique, as our current one, Presidents Johnson and Nixon were still controversial and still sort of funny looking.

On top of all this, boys started to grow their hair long, like The Beatles.  Girls, for their part, stopped wearing bras, which sounded like a good idea, at least for some of them.

All of this caused the Boomers and the "Older Generation" to be at each other's throats.

Fast forward to the 21st Century. There's a new Generation Gap, this time featuring the Boomers versus the groups knows as "The Millennials" (those born from 1981 to 1996) and "Gen Z" (born between 1997-2010).  The group could be called "our children".

One of the first (money-making) salvos in this new Generation Gap is the phrase "Ok Boomer".  The phrase is the younger generation's retort to most of what we boomers have to say.  At least, that's what The New York Times says: "Teenagers use it to reply to cringey YouTube videos, Donald Trump tweets, and basically any person over 30 who says something condescending about young people — and the issues that matter to them." 

The Times goes on to report on a young lady named Shannon O'Connor who has cleared ten thousand dollars selling "OK Boomer Have A Terrible Day" t-shirts. (The kids sure did inherit our ability to be snotty.)

The Times quotes her as saying “The older generations grew up with a certain mindset, and we have a different perspective". (Gee, ya' think?)  “A lot of them don’t believe in climate change or don’t believe people can get jobs with dyed hair, and a lot of them are stubborn in that view. Teenagers just respond, ‘Ok, boomer.’ It’s like, we’ll prove you wrong, we’re still going to be successful because the world is changing.”

I'm not quite sure where Ms. O'Connor got her market research. For example, I've worked with a lot of women in my career and I'm pretty sure they had dyed hair, yeah come on.  But I do kind of like her plucky can-do spirit about making money by selling t-shirts. What's more American than that?

In regards to "climate change", Ms. O'Connor is 19 years old. If my math is correct, this means she was born in 2000.  At that time, "climate change" was called "global warming", which always got a push back when we had a cold winter. Before that, we had a hole in the ozone layer. Before that, we had the threat of global cooling.  This is in between various freakouts over nuclear power, oil spills, and overpopulation. Maybe the older generations have a "certain mindset" because we have heard it all before. The alarm bells, the warnings, the predictions that 20 years from now LIFE AS WE KNOW IT WILL END.   Maybe we just got jaded to it.

Many of the articles about "Ok Boomer" pointed to a reaction by Boomers called the phrase "ageist" and one person tweeted that it was just like a well-known slur.  This prompted the Dictionary to tweet that it was not a slur. I didn't even know The Dictionary had a Twitter account.

"Ok Boomer" may not be a slur, but it is not a term of endearment either.

Look, when I was young, I rolled my eyes at the stories of the generation before me. They walked to school every day. It was three miles and it was uphill both ways. They liked it. They loved it. They would do it again, unlike you hippies smoking your funny cigarettes and not Camel cigarettes like God intended.

Yes, maybe, you have been given the short side of the stick. College is expensive. That's life, kid.

But you have a lot going for you. You can understand all of the new technology, with ease. Y'all can text with ease. I remember the first text I sent out. It took me twenty minutes.

I  have just figured out how to use my key fob.

I promise you. Things will get better. When I was 24, I was living at home, with my parents. My father was dying of COPD. I was working, part-time, at a convenience store. I had three dates since I turned 20.  To top it off,  we were constantly told that we were on the edge of a real existential crisis: a nuclear holocaust. The President was a partially deaf former movie star.

By the time I was 31, I was married, had a good job, had a wife, had a kid, and had a house. The Berlin Wall, which was a wall to keep people in rather than out, had fallen.

Just keep plugging away. I know guys like me sound like Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud. But, we're not saying anything we didn't hear when we were your age.

Just stop saying The Beatles were "overrated".  Okay, kids?