OK Boomer

“OK, Boomer.”

What a delightful phrase?

I’ve been called a Baby Boomer as far back as I can remember. For about the first half-dozen decades there was absolutely no negative connotation to the term at all. It was just a label given to describe an interesting demographic inflating of the old population pyramid.

In real terms it meant that when I was a kid, new wings kept getting added to every school that I attended, and that after my population lump passed along, those same schools never got expanded again.

When we were young, there were constant complaints about us lodged by older citizens. They hated our fashions, and music, and attitudes in general. Personally, I hated getting so derided for committing no greater sin than of being young.

Then, with shocking swiftness, we were no longer young. What were we like? The generation that I was part of constantly complained about the young. We seem to hate their fashions, and music, and attitudes in general. When did we forget how we felt about identical lumping?

Let’s take a concrete example. As a high school teacher, I had contact with young people on a regular basis. What I noticed didn’t match the general perception of adult society towards those same kids.

So, like any educated person should do, I looked up the relevant research to see who was nuts, me or the rest of my age cohort.

It turned out that I wasn’t the uninformed one. In almost every category that exists, kids have been getting better and better. Less violent, less drinking, less tobacco, less pregnancies.

One of the most unfair of the things that old people claim about the young is that they are a bunch of entitled brats. Somehow they are expected to work at their crappy, futureless jobs, with loyalty and gratitude.

I have news for all you Boomers out there; we have never, ever had futures as dismal as the young have. Our parents had it bad, what with World Wars and the Great Depression, but that was certainly not our story.

The Boomer expectation is that most people will get good paying jobs, and if they work loyally, they will be rewarded with continued employment, and eventually receive pensions.

That is the exact opposite of what the young can expect from a job.

How about life style? Can the young expect to ever own their own home?

But no matter the counter arguments, geezers insist on tearing down the young. Maybe they always have. Maybe they always will.

So up pops this new expression, and some Boomers are getting quite upset about it.

It really hit the mainstream in New Zealand of all places. An MP by the name of Chloe Swarbrick was speaking in Parliament on the subject of climate change. She happens to be 25 years of age.

She was getting heckled by a 50-year-old member of the New Zealand National Party, Todd Muller. Swarbrick had just brought up her age in relation to the issue, so it is likely he was insulting her relative youth. Nowhere is it reported just what he was yelling out. It doesn’t matter much, as she stopped him dead in his tracks by inserting into her words the response, “OK, Boomer,” before seamlessly continuing.

It doesn’t even matter that Muller doesn’t fit the description of Boomer, as he was born in 1968, and the most generous boundries of Boomerism have that group ending with people born in 1965.

When questioned on this she responded that, “Boomer is a state of mind.”

I love it all.

It is dismissive of every bit of age discrimination that the old aim at, “young people these days.”

As minor as this entire exchange really was, old people on the internet are suddenly losing their minds. Radio host Bob Lonsberry tweeted that calling somebody a Boomer is equivalent to somebody getting called the N-word.

How’s that for ridiculous? Some cry-baby old fart thinks that a word that has had no connotations whatsoever has suddenly become as demeaning as the most hateful word in the English language. Interestingly, his tweet drew over 18,000 comments, most of whom were tearing him a new one.

Dictionary dot com even weighed in with, “Boomer is an informal noun referring to a person born during a baby boom, especially one born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1965. The n-word is one of the most offensive words in the English language.”

The only bad part is that due to my birth cohort, I just might get lumped in with the anti-young crowd. A First-World problem, right?

I can’t say that I carry the label of Boomer with pride. I never did, and never will. It certainly isn’t any part of my sense of identity.

My identity is all about what I do, and what I am involved with, and the people I care about, and nothing about being part of a group defined by age.