Op-Ed: Boomers, polarization, the environment, and no, none of it’s OK


By Paul Wallis
Published August 21, 2021


“OK Boomer” is a polarizing buzz phrase. It perpetuates a lot of false myths. It’s like “old white guys” (We had a choice?) and about as totally counterproductive as a talking point. There are a few explanations required.

(For the record; polarization was a short-lived academic party trick many decades ago. It kept people interested for about 5 minutes until everyone got bored with it as a one-trick-wonder. Then it became media psychology, and proved there was nothing interesting about it, and never could be. Then it became standard political social engineering.)

About the myths

The myth of Boomer affluence is one of the most misleading. According to this myth, nothing was ever paid for, it all just came along. It didn’t. it all had to be paid for, the hard way for most Boomers. Pay was lousy, and life experience doesn’t make too many deals. The past was lived in, in the usual half-ass mix of not enough money and rising prices.

This particular myth appeals to the sort of people who live in the “Fetch!” society; you go out and fetch a six-digit job, a family, and social status. You wind up about 50 and wondering where everything went. “Everything” in this case is a shopping list, success is a cliché image of someone else, etc. Quality of life back then was better than this Idiot World Theme Park, but what wouldn’t be?

The Boomer-era media created this myth to sell products. There was no ideology, just a sales pitch. It’s like a fashion; it’s just a style, not a fact for many people in every generation.

The myth of Boomer apathy is another. The Boomer era started in 1945, just after the worst war in history. By 1961, Rachel Carson’s iconic Silent Spring came out, beatnik (young Boho culture) was giving rise to the 60s revolution, etc. Apathy wasn’t a currency with teenagers. The world was getting ugly around then. The Cold War was and still is an existential threat.

A tired Greatest Generation, our parents, didn’t quite get it; some didn’t get it at all. This was where the Generation Gap solidified into a hard fact. Non-violence, antiwar protests, peace, and the rest of the litany didn’t get much traction, particularly with the right wing press.

Feminism also didn’t get much of a welcome. One of the uglier hidden histories of those decades is that domestic violence was common, divorce rates soared, and few if any of the basic feminist values got heard, let alone discussed seriously. Feminism as it now is was a thankless task, and a huge achievement.

Among the myths is a pseudo-image regarding early environmentalism. Environmentally, the Boomers tried, usually unsuccessfully. You could protest anything, sure, but getting results was a very different matter. The current state of the world shows how little impact those early environmental movements had in real terms. Nobody listened.

(It should be noted that some of these protests were highly suspect and perhaps sabotaged by so-called “radicals” who invariably derailed discussion with more polarizations. How do you walk into someone’s office, call them all criminals, and expect action? Went down well with the anti-human right wing press of the time, of course. Like the Black Bloc, the idea was to discredit environmentalism. You don’t save rainforest by burning someone’s car, for example. Worth thinking about for this generation.)

Anti-Millennial crap explained

Simultaneously with the polarizing OK Boomer came the anti-Millennial propaganda. “They’re lazy, they want everything, etc. etc.” Wrong on all counts. Millennials are sharp, alert, broke, and worried, with good reason. This world is full of nuts, and they’re “inheriting” a murderous, mismanaged, dunghill.

This process of choreographing a mutual hate campaign is a boringly standard and very old media tactic. Create an argument, make ever-more-extreme statements, feed in more hate on both sides, and then claim to be geniuses representing something. The technique still works, although mainly just with the illiterate. People don’t just naturally hate their grandparents; someone has to tell them they do.

(Actually, you’re morons, you polarizing psych guys. You always have been. You’re always in the way of any and all human rights and aspirations. Usually it’s calling something socialism, or whatever the buzzword for conformists is that week. Disappear into whatever current stupefyingly self-righteous coma you’re in now and stay there. Take your geriatric hate preachers with you.)

Health, education, housing, and other things young people can’t have

While this merry little dance of the mythologies was going on, the next two generations effectively got priced out of every market on Earth. Undiluted decades-long hype turned the housing market into a game of Monopoly nobody but the property sector could win.

Unaffordability is the new status game. An insular corporate culture of “great numbers” for all occasions has basically destroyed real income values. That’s if you have an income, which many people effectively don’t. Debt is piled on the young like never before. Animals look after their kids; this society doesn’t even pretend to try.

Now tell me – How do Millennials or anyone under 30 manage to afford anything right now? What’s the future for people who can’t pay for anything much? Given the entry of artificial intelligence and the obsolescence of so many types of work, how do they get regular incomes?

“That’s their problem,” you say? No, you idiots, it’s the incoming disaster for the world. How do they get mortgages, pay for education and health, or have lives, on gig-economy income streams? What happens to all your capital and asset values if they can’t afford to play your stupid game of Self-Worshipping Monopoly? Markets crashing and assets devaluing on a routine basis? Bingo.

They and future generations are truly 2000% screwed. They’re broke already, despite this ludicrous $30-40 trillion of money they’re supposed to have in their 30s. That’s a drop in the bucket, particularly over any extended period of time. They won’t even be able to afford the holy credit cards.

While we’re on the subject – How do they no-doubt-so-pleasantly while away the intervening decades or so? With what? How do they live, by eating press releases? A (very) few privileged and highly patronized kids who managed to afford an education and survived the ever-shrinking jobs markets will be OK, but most won’t.

Health? Who can afford to be healthy? Most people already can’t, thanks to the totally irrational US business culture’s infatuation with gouging the world. It’s a sort of “genocide by spreadsheet”. Happy?

No, it’s not OK

Many of us Boomers truly hated the insular society from the start. Not much has changed. It was precisely what we fought against. We have nothing against Millennials or their even unluckier follow-up generations. It hasn’t occurred to us that polarization, which we’ve seen so often, achieves anything at all.

Read this article by Greta Thunberg and friends in The New York Times. Be extremely thankful you’ve got kids able and trying to stand up for themselves. Listen to them for once. They’re talking about climate, but the macro “environment” they’re growing up in is a pigsty/sewer at best. Who’s responsible for that? Not them. They’ll have to clean it up.

Boomers don’t expect you useless self-proclaimed “elites” (Ha! “Elite” what? Professional bores, boors and incompetents?) to do anything. You never have. What you do, you invariably screw up and pay yourselves for doing it.

No, it’s not OK, you generation-molesting sycophantic vermin. Get back in your dear little middle aged delusory day care centers, shut up, and get out of the way of humanity. Now.

Read more: https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/boomers-polarization-the-environment-and-no-none-of-its-ok/article#ixzz74Ff20xTx