Thread by @mcjulie

It's kind of hilarious that he construes the fact that ALL the generations AFTER the Boomers kinda hate the Boomers as a fault in, uh, all the other generations.

https://twitter.com/chick_in_kiev/status/1190681359779545088

Like, I'm thinking it's "asshole rules" where if you meet one asshole, you met an asshole, but if it's nothing but assholes all day long, maybe YOU are the asshole.

Woke up thinking about this article so I'm going to say a couple more things about Boomers and generations in general.

The whole concept of defining people by age cohort & giving it a name seems to have arisen WITH the Boomers, because there was this new phenomenon to describe -- the huge demographic surge from babies being born after WWII.

The only other "named generation" we talk about is the "greatest generation," more or less the Boomers' parents. The concept of named generations is ALREADY inherently defined in relation to the Boomers.

Like, Millennials are their kids, Zoomers are their grandkids, Gen X is their kid sister who moved out of the house young and went to New York and everybody forgets she's even part of the family because she rarely comes around for Thanksgiving.

My own parents are BARELY too old to be Boomers according to the technical cutoff, although I think sometimes my mom is a Boomer, but culturally they are Boomers. My dad is even the child of a WWII vet.

Although my spouse, who is my age, is the child of TWO WWII vets -- the youngest child of a large family -- so you see how the whole "generations" thing is a little inadequate to describe the reality.

Although, in a way, his experience is illustrative: when his oldest brothers (Boomers) were growing up, their family wasn't super poor, but by the time he was growing up in the 1970s, they were. His dad had been retired for decades.

@paulcarp13 was raised with "middle class" cultural values on poverty wages and he's actually the most bitter-toward-Boomers Gen-Xer I've ever known.

@paulcarp13 This song sums it up pretty well: genius.com/Kevin-gilbert-…

"The baby boomers had it all and wasted everything. Now recess is almost over, and they won't get off the swing."

@paulcarp13 When I was growing up, we would SOMETIMES subscribe to a daily newspaper. I liked it when we did. I'm kind of a pop culture news junkie, which is, uh, why I have kind of a Twitter problem, and I've ALWAYS hated TV news.

@paulcarp13 I probably learned to hate it when Mom would interrupt cartoons so she could watch the weather and I would be groaning, "Mom, we live in southern California, we don't HAVE weather!"

@paulcarp13 But also, I hated how long it took. Like, I could've READ that story in two minutes and it took you ten minutes plus commercials to speak it out loud to me.

@paulcarp13 Also, I think even as a kid I had an inkling that TV news was inherently biased in certain ways. That it was based around "trusted names" and was treated like "oh, this friend of mine who is Walter Cronkite, he said..."

@paulcarp13 That same phenomenon is killing us with Fox News. Like, I don't know how anybody could adore Sean Hannity the way they once adored Walter Cronkite, but the evidence is: they do.

@paulcarp13 Anyway, when I read these printed newspapers -- the Orange County Register, or, later, The Seattle Times -- I would always read the editorial page. I remember it as always being the final two-page spread in the news section, and there was always a cartoon.

@paulcarp13 Maybe the cartoon is what got me reading the editorials, since the other part of the paper I was sure to read was the cartoons.

Anyway, all of this is to establish how I formed my ideas about Baby Boomers while growing up as a Gen X kid in the 70s.

@paulcarp13 What I noticed, often, with editorials, is that they would have a presumed "we" -- they would say things like "we are all very concerned about this in these ways" but it was obvious that "we" didn't actually mean everyone.

@paulcarp13 It was obvious that "we" often meant only middle-class white people, or only men. But the most common exclusionary "we" was age-related. "We" was people *around* the age of my parents.

@paulcarp13 When I was ten this didn't seem weird. Nobody cares what ten-year-olds think pretty much EVER. But when I was fifteen, sixteen, I noticed that the "we" hadn't changed at all. It was still Boomers.

@paulcarp13 Then I was in college. I was 18, 19, 20, 21, and the "we" continued to be Boomers, not only in editorials, but pop culture in general. "We" had grown up as kids in the 1950s. "We" were in our thirties and worried about buying real estate and whatnot.

@paulcarp13 The first time I ever read anything about ME, it was an article about the "Boomerang Generation" and how this was a troubling new development, kids who graduated from college and moved back in with their parents for a while.

@paulcarp13 We weren't even Generation X until the book of that name caught on. The book was released in 1991. Think about that. X-ers were born roughly 1964-1980 and we didn't have a NAME until 1991

@paulcarp13 Now, if you lived in the Seattle area in 1991-1994 that was absolutely Gen X central, and for a moment the eye of pop culture was focused squarely on us, and it was, to be sure, a heady time.

@paulcarp13 I'm going to quote Hunter S. Thompson about that -- born in 1937 and too old to be a Boomer --

"San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run"

@paulcarp13 "every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

@paulcarp13 What happened with Gen X is that Kurt Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994, and we all remember where we were when we heard about it the same way Boomers remember the Kennedy assassination, and then the roving eye of pop culture moved on.

@paulcarp13 But also, Hunter S. Thompson was born in 1937. The "we" he's talking about is NOT Boomers, and yet, Boomers appropriated that "we" 100%. As I got older, in the 90s, Boomers appropriated MY "we" as well --

@paulcarp13 When I was in my 30s and the youngest possible Boomer was in their 40s, Boomers would still describe themselves as Thirty-something, you know, like the TV show.

@paulcarp13 The Boomer "we" was flexible, reaching backward to take credit for creating a 1960s in which they were mostly passive observers, reaching forward to claim a lost-between-the-gears generation that never truly got our pop culture spotlight the way they did.

@paulcarp13 And the older I got, the more frustrating it seemed that my generation was never the "we" -- we were, at best, a pop culture fad which produced some memorable music and stupid jokes about plaid, and then -- what, are you still here?

@paulcarp13 A lot of the "Millennials killed" changes were already well underway with Gen X -- I don't know anybody my age who GOLFS, for example -- but nobody noticed.

@paulcarp13 And that "we" got extra weird when I started to see voices YOUNGER than me, people who were, chronologically, Millennials, who seemed to be co-opting that Boomer "we"

@paulcarp13 I've seen it in political editorials, but it was most glaringly apparent in the rantings of the SF "puppies" who were, like 35-year-olds complaining about "new" changes in SF that were already old hat by the time I was involved in fandom.

@paulcarp13 I mean, in 2015 you would get somebody born in 1981 complaining about something that started happening to the genre in 1969.

That's how bizarre it was.

@paulcarp13 And yet, I could see how it might come about -- when the "we" always means Boomers, you internalize that. Boomers become the perpetual now. "We" are always and forever -- Boomers.

@paulcarp13 Just take a look at the "Millennials are killing" genre. It's still, 100%, based on the perspective that the "we" is Boomers, and those dastardly Millennials are killing our thing.

Millennials. Kids today. You know, in their thirties.

@paulcarp13 And not every individual Boomer is a nightmare of narcissistic entitlement totally lacking in self-awareness. Stephen King, for example, is a Boomer whose work has always both reflected and challenged his own generation.

@paulcarp13 His book On Writing has this quote:
“I don’t want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world but opted for the Home Shopping Network Instead)…”

@paulcarp13 He recognized that the generation immediately before Boomers -- the generation that MADE the 1960s -- had created the circumstances where the Boomers could have continued their progress on civil rights and environmental issues, and the Boomers basically squandered it.

@paulcarp13 The Boomers got scared of the future and elected Ronald Reagan, and for that alone, they should never be forgiven unless they repent and work 100% for the future.

@paulcarp13 The thing about Millennials is that they are a large enough demographic to finally challenge the Boomers' perpetual command of the "we," their perpetual now, and Boomers do NOT, as it were, want to get off the swing.

@paulcarp13 So of course we (younger generations) resent them. They're a corrupt ruling class, and the rest of us are the peasants they exploit.

@paulcarp13 We're trying to pay rent in a world where they own houses & the "we" treats high real estate values as perpetually a good thing.

@paulcarp13 We're trying to pay off crushing college debt in a world where the "we" is still thinking "college, pfft, I paid for that with my paper route money"

@paulcarp13 We're trying to get medical care in a world where the "we" transitioned smoothly from "good stable job with benefits" to Medicare and doesn't know what the fuss is all about.

@paulcarp13 One way to look at Trmpism is, that it was an attempt of traditionally centered groups (white, nominally Çhristian, male) to retain that centrality.

@paulcarp13 To see their racism, religious bigotry, and sexism as an attempt to ensure that they remained the "we" at the center of everything -- that Maga sadism is, in part, the actions of wounded narcissism, writ large --

@paulcarp13 That the one simple lesson they could have learned, "not everything has to be about you," is the one lesson they CANNOT tolerate, their ego cannot bear the stress.

@paulcarp13 But I think we have to include "Boomer" in that list of traditionally centered groups. And, just like all the other traditionally centered groups, they don't KNOW their privilege because they take it for granted. It seems natural to them that they always be the "we."

@paulcarp13 Going back to the article,

"Millennials (and to some extent their Gen-X and Gen-Z brethren) hate their elders with a ferocity never before seen in our culture."

Except... isn't one of the defining Boomer experiences supposed to be arguing with their conservative elders?

@paulcarp13 Did All in the Family exist or not? I'm so confused.

Really, Boomers are just pissed off to find their own "whatever Grandpa" attitude turned against them. They think they're the only ones allowed to use it.

@paulcarp13 "Egged on by the media-savvy likes of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, they blame prolonged heat waves on boomers who supposedly stood by and cheered as the Earth went up in flames."

I mean... is that NOT true?
Did y'all NOT vote for Ronald Reagan?
Again, I am so confused.

@paulcarp13 If Boomers, as a whole, had decided in 1990 or so that global warming was a really dire threat that we all needed to address, WE WOULD HAVE ADDRESSED IT.

@paulcarp13 The dude writing the article doesn't even cite his own personal climate activism as a defense -- probably because any actual Boomer environmentalist would be just as frustrated by the Boomers as a whole as we are.

@paulcarp13 So his argument is "appeal to incredulity," a well-known logical fallacy. "It's so absurd to think we were literally standing by cheering on global warming! When instead what we were doing was standing by yelling loudly that it wasn't a thing! And continue to do so!"

@paulcarp13 "The phrase “OK BOOMER” has now become young people’s “repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it,” marking “the end of friendly generational relations,” The New York Times declared last week."

Again, wait, were the 60s but a dream?

@paulcarp13 "According to the article, a teen designer has already sold $10,000 worth of sweatshirts with the “OK BOOMER” slogan repeated many times on the front, ending with the line, “Have a terrible day.”"

@paulcarp13 Really? Good for them.

Hey, Boomer, these kids wouldn't need to be making money on sweatshirts if wages had kept pace with inflation, and college, housing, and health care were even remotely affordable.

@paulcarp13 But think about it. Your own children are accusing you of making a shitty world for them to live in, and your response is to blame them for being rude.

@paulcarp13 Yelling at people for being "rude" is tacit admission that they're not WRONG, you just wish they'd be nicer about it. But even if they were, it wouldn't change your behavior, so why should they bother?

@paulcarp13 "unlike those of us who came of age in the 1960s-early 1970s, who merely disapproved of our elders’ “colonialist” wars and shag rugs, millennials (born between 1980-1994) can’t stand the air we boomers breathe."

Uh....

@paulcarp13 "Unlike kids today, we Boomers disapproved of our elders in the CORRECT manner"

Like, ugh, way to demonstrate the exact narcissistic lack of self-reflection the rest of us are complaining about.

@paulcarp13 "Too many millennials whine that their complacent elders bequeathed them a rotten America and a rotten world — economic malaise that will leave them with lousier lives than their parents and a planet on fire from climate change."

Yes? And?

@paulcarp13 "But if they spent more time studying actual history, which can’t easily be found on iPhones"

Excuse me? My iPhone gives me access to 1. The Internet 2. The library 3. Bookstores, historical societies, museums, scholars who write essays, etc. etc.

@paulcarp13 If YOU can't find history on your iPhone, that's on you, Boomer.

I run into surprising and factual bits of actual history practically every day, usually on my phone, because I commute on the bus.

@paulcarp13 The more I think about this, the weirder it gets. What do you even think iPhones ARE, Boomer, my lad? Do you think we get a DIFFERENT Internet on our phones than you get on your laptop?

@paulcarp13 "they’d know that boomers were, and remain, the most socially and environmentally conscious generation America ever has ever known."

Except, y'all voted for Reagan, GWB, and Trmpy, so, basically, no? You are NOT the most socially and environmentally conscious generation?

@paulcarp13 "Maybe too much so — our universities’ overwhelmingly “progressive” agendas originated in the 1960s and have become more dominant ever since."

Yeah, see, there it is. "My generation is super progressive! Not me though!"

@paulcarp13 I went to college in the 1980s and everybody was majoring in "business" and computer science, don't try to tell me about universities.

@paulcarp13 "the United States is an immeasureably more open, diverse and tolerant society than it was in the 1950s."

Except, as far as I can tell, it's mostly Boomers who want to stop-reverse that. Again: Reagan, GWB, Trmp. Without Boomers, they don't win.

@paulcarp13 But that's a Boomer thing, taking credit for something that you actually fought the whole way.

@paulcarp13 "Boomers also won the Cold War against Communist tyranny and along the way brought us unprecedented prosperity and technological innovation."

Oh, right. That Cold War that maybe we never actually won at all, given Russian interference in our recent elections?

@paulcarp13 The "unprecedented prosperity" thing is a tell. Prosperity for whom, exactly? For Boomers? Sure, nobody disputes that! You DID bring unprecedented prosperity for yourselves!

@paulcarp13 Are younger generations currently enjoying the fruits of that prosperity? Or are we struggling, in a world of rising rents and stagnant wages? Is it reasonable to talk about Boomers hoarding wealth, often in the form of real estate?

@paulcarp13 "While some millennials are truly committed to constructive change, many more seem to be upset mainly because they have to “work too hard.”"

Oh, DO tell.

@paulcarp13 "Their lust to become CEOs at 25 without first paying their dues or even learning the business is hilariously satirized on “The Millennials,” a “Saturday Night Live” segment where a vapid young woman demands a promotion after three days on the job."

Uh...

@paulcarp13 I have literally never heard a SINGLE Millennial complain about this. Millennials complain about not being able to find a job that makes student debt, rent, and health care affordable. These are very BASIC things, my dude, not "becoming a CEO at 25"

@paulcarp13 I mean, has it occurred to you that this way in which you view Millennials is WHY they hate you so much? Where you dismiss their "I can't afford to remain alive" concerns as entitled whining?

@paulcarp13 Maybe if you stopped doing that and actually LISTENED for a change they wouldn't be making fun of you.

You know, just a thought.

@paulcarp13 "Plenty of ambitious, future-focused millennials work their hearts out at taxing, low-paying jobs. But many “working” members of their generation wear their resentment on their un-ironed sleeves."

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE, BOOMER, I DON'T KNOW ANY OF THEM

@paulcarp13 "They’re out to lunch in a different way. They seem allergic to using the phone, or even waiting on customers."

Okay, true story, I started to notice back in 2008 that I often got very bad service from store clerks, and I concluded it was because --

@paulcarp13 They had jobs, that didn't pay, where it didn't seem to matter whether you did a good job or a bad job, the pay was the same either way, and they hated what they were doing and didn't see a future in it, so they did a bad job.

@paulcarp13 Did I hate the clerks for this? No, I hated the managers & CEOs.

@paulcarp13 "A stoned Starbucks clerk, after asking me to endlessly repeat my order for a grande coffee, then repeating it to himself, asked me, “What were you having?”"

I dunno, I get EXCELLENT service from the people at the Starbucks where I work, maybe the problem is you?

@paulcarp13 In fact, I would take a wild guess that, as a coffee-loving Seattle person I have had more interactions at more Starbucks than this dude, and ALL of them have been pretty good, honestly.

@paulcarp13 I don't doubt that there's a stoned dude somewhere giving people bad service, I just believe that's far from the typical experience.

@paulcarp13 And again, I submit: if people in a particular industry are giving consistently bad service, BLAME THE FREAKING MANAGERS & CEOS because honestly.

@paulcarp13 Then he tries to argue that student loan debt isn't reeeeeally that high and it seems OBVIOUS that he's full of it there so I won't go into detail.

@paulcarp13 Ooo, but then he does the most OK Boomer thing possible, arguing that he did something special by paying off his college debt by "busing tables in a high-volume steakhouse under merciless, slave-driving owners"

@paulcarp13 You know, as if Millennials could easily pay off THEIR college debt if only they were willing to do the same. As if they're not already doing the same.

@paulcarp13 As if Millennial hero AOC isn't already sparking a weird culture war among those who seem to think it's, uh, bad? To have worked as a bartender before going into Congress?

@paulcarp13 Anyway, in conclusion, Boomers CONTINUE to not be willing to get off the swing, and it's at best annoying, at worst deadly, to the generations that follow them. The end.