“OK boomer …”
In general, I don’t have a problem with the expression.
Both of my children, neither of whom are baby boomers, will live as well or better than their parents, and we have no complaints about the way we live.
Both earned their success, working hard in school, making good career choices and then working their butts off at their jobs. We did them one big favor, getting them through college with no student loan debt.
Both of them are grateful, and as far as I know, neither is a boomer basher.
I probably like my generation less than they do.
I mean, as a generation we really do act as if the world began the way we were born and every time we brought home a good grade from school it was as if we had invented the wheel.
I am not about to claim — or to admit — that we were the worst generation because we were never tested in the way our parents were, by the Great Depression or World War II. We didn’t start or finish the civil rights movement, but we did push the struggle against racism farther down the road and we were the biggest voting bloc in 2008 when the U.S. became the first country to elect a president from a minority of less than 15 percent of the population.
We didn’t start all that strong with boomer presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but we can be pretty proud of boomer president Barack Obama.
As for those who want to blame the boomers for huge deficits and massive national debt, I’m gonna have to call bullshit on that one. Ronald Reagan and the people behind him were not boomers.
No, our problem is that we settled for too little. We settled for great toys. Until I was 40, the biggest television I ever had was a 13-inch screen. Now I sit five feet away from a 55-inch, UHD curved screen in my office. Worse yet, I’m wondering if 65 inches or 75 inches would fit.
I’ve got hundreds of books I’ll never get around to reading, hundreds of movies I’ll never watch and all sorts of great old TV shows I’ll never make it through.
And when I die, no one who matters to me will want them.
Stephen King absolutely nailed it in his longish short story “Why We’re in Vietnam” as part of his “Hearts in Atlantis” collection.
“Why We’re in Vietnam” is set in 1999, and is pretty much one Vietnam vet explaining to another that they had never really returned.
“You know the price of selling out the future? You can never really leave the past. You can never get over. My thesis is you’re not really in New York at all.. You’re in the Delta, leaning back against a tree, stoned and rubbing bug-dope on the back of your neck. Packer’s still the man because it’s still 1969.
“Everything you think of as ‘your later life’ is a big fucking pot-bubble. And it’s better that way. Vietnam is better. That’s why we stay there.”
The fact is that for the last 50-some years life is getting stupider and stupider. As an older boomer (b. 1949) I started saying more than a decade ago it was time for us to get off the stage and let a less damaged generation straighten things out.
We’re not bad.
We’re just damaged.
I have friends so damaged that they believe in contradictory things that cannot possibly happen.
We need to get out of the way and let our children take over. It’s surprising now many great children some of us have.
I don’t think there are many people in our country who would be a better president than my daughter, and my son would no be far behind.
Of course, as naturalized citizens, neither is eligible to be president.
Too bad.