OK, Boomers!

I’ll freely admit that when I first got wind of the “OK, Boomer” meme I was a little annoyed. Being singled out for advancing age and being a bit out of it is generally not a fun thing, especially when you’re headed into your final laps on the planet and your goal is to blissfully navigate on cruise control.

But it does seem like a common right of passage in your elder years to be dissed as irrelevant by the youngsters. I remember well not being able to trust anyone over 30. But, yeah, I was stung a tad when I read about what the phrase’s intention was and how it was being used, although it was thankfully never directed at me face to face.

I’d worked with a lot of Millennials and a few Gen Z in my career, and although my contemporaries at times had issues with them, I was generally far more put off by the insanely competitive and at times underhanded behaviors of some of my contemporaries than any of the traits of these groups. Part of what I did for a living involved trying to improve people’s engagement on the job, so getting to know generational idiosyncrasies was something I did with purpose. For me anyway, there was always a lot more to appreciate and admire about the Millennial and Gen Z approach to life and work than there was to complain about.

Work / life balance was something that made sense to me and I yearned for, and their interest in acquiring a variety of experiences rather than a variety of things suggested a level-headed set of priorities to me. Sure, they easily became frustrated with my repeated clumsiness with technology, but it frustrated me, too. They clearly cared about climate change when so many Boomers had just ignored it, and I could understand their desire to not get deep into debt by owning too much stuff. Some of their work habits and personality traits bothered other Boomers, but not me.

So when the “OK, Boomer” thing rolled out and I became aware of it sometime in 2019, I was a little miffed but also curious, so I dug into it on-line quite a bit. What I found when I looked deeper into what they were saying was that it was far less cynical and a lot more positively idealistic than I had anticipated. After some investigation, consideration and soul searching, I had to finally admit to myself that the little buggers seemed to have a point, dammit.

Because I began thinking about what my generation was passionate about when I was a teen and young adult: the environment, politics, civil rights, racism, women’s rights, war, inequality, injustice, the “military industrial complex,” corporate greed, freedom of expression…stuff like that. And some fifty years later, I was angrily coming to realize that we were still fighting the very same fights we had been fighting then. Every year as the Earth Days agonizingly piled up, and the climate crisis worsened and the climate science deniers stalled action year after year, the frustration become increasingly intense for me.

So what exactly are the pesky Millennials and Gen Z folks so crabby about, anyway? It’s not just that we Boomers don’t understand them, aren’t real hip with technology and have permanently polluted Facebook. One of their fundamental gripes is that we have dealt them a pretty crummy world to get along in, much the same thing we griped about at their age, frankly. But, let’s explore their inherited world a bit.

We’ve known for over 50 years what climate change would do, and now it’s doing it. The cost of a college education is obscene. There is no livable wage standard, many families can’t get by on two incomes, much less one, and job benefits with health insurance and paid time off are not provided for a good portion of the working class. (I’m just getting started here, so you’ll have to be patient.)

Income and wealth in our society is hyper-concentrated at the top, our political system is morbidly corrupt and run by corporations and special interest groups, corporations pay a pittance of profits in taxes, our regulatory system and environmental laws are being gutted, access to affordable, quality health care is still a privilege, systemic racism and misogyny remain major problems in employment and in our societal institutions and we just can’t bring ourselves to address a pretty straightforward problem like homelessness, but we can spend bazillions on military fly overs as a political stunt.

As an aside, here’s an interesting factoid by way of illustration. In the1950’s CEO pay averaged about 20 times the average worker’s pay in the United States. Today it can easily average as high as 500 times. Do the math. No one is worth that much money. But that’s what you get when markets are free and unregulated: obscene market perversions and unrestrained greed, and that doesn’t even address whether or not these predominantly white, male CEO’s pay an appropriate amount in taxes. (They don’t.)

And when something really ugly like COVID-19 comes along, it is still the most vulnerable in our country that take it in the neck. People of color, immigrant citizens, indigenous people, the poor, the elderly and the infirm preferentially suffer and die because our “leaders” are inept and more concerned about the optics for the next election than reducing suffering. The suffering of people is exacerbated because our Executive Branch administrative agencies have been stripped of experience, talent and expertise and are being led by politically appointed hacks. When social unrest results from the brutal murders of people of color by police, a belligerent, hostile white minority and their chosen elected officials respond with racist, white supremacist and fascist threats and actions.

So with all this in mind I can readily understand why the Millennials and Gen Z’s are edgy and direct their collective angst in the Boomer direction. After all, we’ve been the adults in the room for quite a while and seem to have presided over the escalating moral rot of civilization with which they are now squarely faced. So I get it, Millennials and Gen Z. Mea culpa.

I can’t say though that everyone in the Boomer generation has necessarily been asleep at the wheel, nor have we all selfishly ignored the messes that have persisted as long as they have. I know I haven’t, and I feel like I did my part to speak out, protest and support causes and people that would help fix things. But I will admit to a certain naiveté in a significant area that I also feel a good number of Boomers just didn’t recognize clearly enough for what it was until maybe the last four or five years.

Sure, we’ve made a bunch of mistakes and maybe our idealism and priorities were marginalized to some degree by life’s demands as we matured, but our most colossal goof was that we just didn’t comprehend the degree to which an invasive parasitic specie was embedding itself in our government and institutions, ceaselessly sucking our national resources and energy. We severely underestimated the greed, the tenacious mendacity and the persistent racism of powerful, wealthy, privileged and mostly Protestant white oligarchs taking control of the United States.

Look closely at the history of our government, our corporate boards, our educational institutions and non-profits, and I think you will find that we have been led to our present state, teetering on the edge of a dystopian apocalypse, by a class of powerful, privileged white people (mostly males, as it happens) and families that have persistently served themselves and their lineage first and have established a seemingly indomitable stranglehold on the power of our government and social institutions. “Movement Conservatives” and Libertarians espousing Neoliberal dogma have over the last fifty or so years come to infect every aspect of our society with a white privilege monolithic presence, waging a “culture war” against the rest of us, funded by the ultra-wealthy and coopting, indoctrinating and manipulating a fearful, disenfranchised, racist and angry white minority of the population.

They have hijacked a political party, established well-funded think tanks and lobbying organizations to promote their elitist agenda and created and funded a nationwide talk radio network and propaganda based TV network, all in the service of the power structure of a white, wealthy, male-dominated oligarchy. They have grotesquely gerrymandered our election districts, suppressed voter participation and have relied on an outdated and functionally unrepresentative Electoral College system to win Presidential Elections. They have intentionally confused Democratic Socialism with Socialism, thereby raising a red herring Red Scare about any progressive political agenda that actually reduces the suffering of people. They are at this moment engineering a deliberate undercount of the national census in cities, to purposefully disenfranchise people of color, and are hobbling the Postal Service to gut mail in voting.

So we Boomers just misjudged the tenacity, selfishness, greed and raw racist power of what we can justifiably label as the Dark Side of American politics and societal power. So what do we do about it now?

We come together. We coalesce. We energize. We act forcefully as One Movement to finally assure real liberty and true equality in the United States. Generationally, and as a people we wrest power and control from the American Oligarchs. Progressives, Moderates, Independents and Responsible Republicans can act in concert. Women, people of color, immigrant citizens, indigenous people, the LGBTQIA+ community, the poor, the elderly and yes, young people can take control and implement the will of the people; all the people. We can act as one people and elect generations of compassionate leaders that truly represent the multicultural, diverse demographics of our country. We can establish corporate and non-profit boards that are similarly inclusive. We the People can do this.

The numbers are on our side as the privileged white ruling class is dwindling as our country becomes increasingly multicultural over time. Why do you think they are so intent on stopping immigration? To curtail the multicultural evolution of the United States which will ultimately suck away the power of the privileged, wealthy, powerful white minority. The Empire is indeed dying, but it is not going down without a fight, folks. Sound familiar? Gen Xers and Millennials in particular grew up with and were big fans of the Star Wars movies, so they get the analogy. The Dark Side has been powerful, but the Resistance leads us to the light in this heroic, existential battle.

So, back to the opening premise here. I think we Boomers just need to acknowledge that we risk bequeathing a pretty slimy world to the youngsters and rather than whining about them maybe we need to listen to them more and work hard with them to make stuff happen in a positive way in the few years we have left to redeem our generational legacy.

The demographic groups…Boomers, Gen Z and Millennials are undeniably “yuge” in sheer numbers, and even “yuger” when you add in Gen X who are likeminded in their collective pissoffedness with the present ugly state of our government and its negative effects on the people. Together, we can cause a major disruption in the Force, starting this November. We can deliver a gargantuan voter turnout that will conclusively repudiate this compassionless, selfish and corrupt governance and overcome the lying, cheating and illegality the Dark Side will bring to this year’s campaign and vote.

So, fellow Boomer curmudgeons, do this: take a deep breath and keep your eye on the prize. Be a lot more tolerant of these beautiful young people that represent the planet’s future and work hard with and respect those that are inheriting this cluster we couldn’t yet fix. It’s the least we can do. And as for the rest of you generational lovelies: saddle up. It’s time to move this planet in a cosmically new and healthy direction.

“We came, we saw, we kicked its ass.” Bill Murray as Peter Venkman in “Ghostbusters.”

(Photo and artwork by Joan E. Hargate)