“OK, Boomer...” 😡😡🤬

If you hang around social media enough--particularly Twitter--you will have come across the phrase, "OK, Boomer."

The first time I saw it, it sent me into an orbit of shock and indignation.  I felt compelled to make some kind of move in defense of my generation.  So, I threw out a comment about it.  I was immediately swamped by a stack of nasty, confrontational retorts, all basically exclaiming that the Boomer generation was responsible for all bad things in America and the world, and I should just shut the fuck up.

Since that time, if I'm ever hankering for Twitter interaction, all I have to do is step up to the "OK Boomer" challenge.  I can argue a thread for an entire day.  Of course, it doesn't get me anywhere.  So what's the point?

I get that all generations tend to turn on their parents at some point in their lives...for awhile.  When I was in high school, it was practically required that you actively hate your parents in order to be a card-carrying teen-ager.  I didn't necessarily subscribe to that...I saw no reason to hate my parents, so I didn't.  But I was definitely in the minority.

Becoming an adult is a matter of going through many phases of awareness of the parameters of one's life, and (hopefully) gaining wisdom in how they came about and how to deal with them.  At some point, kids start to figure out that their lives are highly affected by things over which they have no control.  It's frustrating and maddening, and the first instinct is to find somebody to pin it on, since they know it's not THEIR fault.  Parents, being the closest-at-hand representations of authority and "unreasonable" restrictions, are the easiest targets for the blame.  THEY set up the unfair world which WE now have to live in.  They suck.  

Fast forward a decade or so.  Having had to navigate the world for several more years, and getting a broader and broader view of how things are set up and who or what is responsible for creating the culture in which we are required to function, we start to understand that no single generation can be saddled with the blame.  We understand that our parents faced challenges THEY had no voice in creating, as did their parents, and their parents, et cetera ad infinitum.  We Boomers got that eventually.  We went from vilifying our parents to conceding that they were "The Greatest Generation."  

In the end, we understood that they deserved our love and respect.  

But this conglomeration of little cats X,Y and Z (hat tip to Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat) has decided that Boomers are the easy and sole target for their angst.  We are responsible for every difficulty they have to face.  They have not yet, and possibly will not ever, get past the "blame game" stage.  Because they seem to be frozen in time, paralyzed by the economic, ecological and political minefields they are having to navigate. I don't mean to minimize the challenges they are facing.  In many ways, they're having a much more difficult time than we did.  But it seems like it's so much easier for them to glue their noses to their phones or video games and whine about how hard thing are, than to get out there and LIVE, and try to figure out how to change things.

I wonder if technology has just robbed thees generations of their imagination...of their creativity.  They don't seem to have the chops to imagine the world they want and to make it happen.  I read articles whining about how Boomers are standing in the way of millennials getting the goodies of life.   We shouldn't buy homes, because we're supposed to leave the homes in lower price ranges for the millennials.  We're "hoarding wealth" if we hold on to the homes we've owned for years, that have, through no fault of ours, skyrocketed in value.  We need to die or retire, so millennials can have our jobs.  

It's like they don't have enough imagination to come up with new strategies, new businesses, new policies.  They want OURS.  And we're supposed to hand them over.  Yesterday.  Because that's how the world works, right?  

Talk about entitlement?!!?!     

In attempting to do some research for this post, I came across this article:  What Does "OK Boomer" Mean?  I could barely wade my way through all the rhapsodizing about the many, varied, highly-reasoned meanings for this offensive, ageist, divisive, dismissive meme.  

Millennials are OVER years and years of condescension by "boomers".  They're tired of "boomers" criticizing their gender identities, their recreational activities, their attitudes toward employment.  Millennials don't believe "boomers" are invested in helping them change the world (to their specifications.)  Millennials don't feel they are required to follow or even listen to "out-of-touch" advice or rules set up in workplaces by 'boomer' bosses.  

Thus this two-word condemnation of an entire generation echoing through social media is entirely justified.  And "boomers" need to just get over it.  Because millennials are allowed to react to what they perceive as generation-based slights, but "boomers" need to shut up and take it.  Because it's millennials' turn to...be assholes?

My first reaction to being "OK-Boomer-ed" on Twitter was to think..."Ah.  Just what we need.  Yet another way to divide people.  We don't have enough of that going on already."  In the end, above and beyond any argument I could make for the economic challenges boomers face today right along with the rest of the peons; or how we stood for progressive change when we were young, and made it happen; or how we as school kids were trained to cover our heads and hide under our desks when the atom bombs were dropped on us; the most caustic fact about the spread of this meme and the attitude it encourages is that it advances the division of the human race into smaller and smaller and smaller warring factions.  How is that good, or cathartic?  How does it improve the human condition?  How does it make anybody's life better?

It isn't, and it doesn't.  

So spare me your, "THIS is what 'OK Boomer' means, and THIS is why it's smart, on-point, justified and perfectly OK."

No...it's ageist, dismissive, bigoted and downright mean.

If that's who millennials want to be...

Well, that's just pathetic.