“Okay, Boomer,” I said.
“What can I help you with,” came the reply from my son’s car speaker.
He and I both started laughing so hard that his car weaved slightly. Fortunately, his all-electric vehicle had plenty of room in his lane.
I was trying to tell him about a story I had read concerning the use of the phrase, “Okay, Boomer.” His car interpreted that phrase as “Okay Google.” For the rest of the night, whenever conversation lagged, one of us would repeat the phrase and start laughing when the car answered. I hate to break it to my fellow Baby Boomers, but laughter is the proper response to that phrase being thrown at you. It is a brilliant and proper dismissal of our pontificating. If you can’t laugh at the irony of that meme, it’s time to climb in the rocker, turn on Fox News, and STFU.
Exhibit A is the college professor I was telling my son about. When a student used the phrase on him, he indignantly sputtered that “Okay, Boomer” was as hurtful as calling someone the N-word. The story didn’t say, but I’d bet my entire bank account that he was white. Only a white male could say something that stupid. While I applaud the fact that he is still teaching, still trying to make the world a better place, he has forgotten his roots.
Baby Boomers are such a huge demographic that social scientists have always had to be careful about generalizing. But now that COVID-19 is reducing our numbers it may be appropriate to take stock. Like every generation, we had our hits and misses. Music certainly was a big part of our identity. And much of our music contained social messages. Yet our tastes ran from Country Joe and the Fish to Merle Haggard, so it’s hard to find much common ground there. Still, a majority of us sang along with Roger Daltry when he spat out the phrase, “I hope I die before I get old,” in My Generation. Our social causes included the war and equal rights for every race, for females, and for gays. Not all of us were on board for each of those but most of us supported at least one of those causes.
The Swing generation hated our music. They also hated our politics which probably defined us better than anything besides music. Opposition to the Vietnam War was a huge part of our teens and twenties. Representatives for our elders, such as Al Capp, lectured us on how we should only talk about things we understood like puberty and pimples. We responded with, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” We took to the streets in protest, whether it was out of moral conviction or self-preservation, is not always clear. Some of us protested and still served. Some chose exile or jail. And some used legal scams to get out of service. I’m talking about you, Ted Nugent and Donald Trump. You perfected draft dodging as performance art.
Our track record on presidents is also a mixed bag. We drove LBJ out of office only to scare the Greatest Generation into electing Nixon. Our political muscle produced Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, and Trump. Two eloquent distinguished legal scholars, and two who used a Vega-Matic on the English language. Two adulterers, a Nobel Prize winner, and a drugstore cowboy. I’ll let you sort out which is which. I’ll also let you explain why a generation of white women who propelled and benefited from the women’s movement voted so overwhelmingly against Hillary.
As for our offspring, we produced the most entitled (next to ourselves) and spoiled group of kids and grandkids. What can be expected from a generation like ours that is so weak it can’t even handle six weeks of quarantine without whining. It’s no wonder that Millennials, iGeners, etc., are so soft. The Greatest Generation produced enough guns, tanks, airplanes, and bullets every hour to batter both the Third Reich and the Japanese into submission. Today, we can’t even figure out how to get enough rubber gloves, masks, and Q-tips to doctors and nurses trying to save our dumb asses.
Ultimately, the best measure of the Baby Boom generation is what kind of world we created for the future. Between global warming and plastic pollution, I say we get a big fat F. Yes, I know we created the Internet, Earth Day, and Earthships, but it’s hardly enough. Our short-sighted embrace of the convenience of plastic is everywhere both seen and unseen. White plastic grocery bags hang from trees, fences, and power lines undulating in the breeze like Ebenezer’s ghosts confronting us with our disposable mentality. But the real threat is that plastic only breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. Demosthenes’ atomic theory is brought to life. Scientists have found that in lab animals, when these pieces of plastic get small enough, they lodge in the blood/brain area. The reduced blood flow results in increased stupidity in the animals. The movie Idiocracy might just might turn out to be a future documentary.
The younger generations who are trying to clean up our messes as well as live their own lives are correctly dismissing our opinions with, “Okay, Boomer.” It is the most succinct and ironic way to verbalize both their right and their duty to ignore us and figure things out on their own. We’ve done enough, thank you. We can support their efforts, but our job of guiding them is long over. Embrace it. “They got this.” Put new tennis balls on your walker, tap a classic rock station on Pandora and relive Glory Days. Anything else is just spitting into the wind.
