OK BOOMER? MILLIE, PLEASE, HOLD BACK GEN Z

Younger generations have a thing about baby boomers?

“Ok, boomer,” is their go-to slam?

Fine with me. I’m a boomer and I’ve been complaining about boomers, a particular group of them, and now we’re all bunched together.

My biggest complaint has been with guys like childless Mike Rowe dragging millennials through his dirty work.

Is he wrong? Here’s the breakdown:

Millennials ARE the NBA, NFL, and every sporting league and event worth a damn. If it’s not the Millies, it’s Gen Z. So why the bitching and complaining about the youth when they do the impossible, like run and jump like no one has ever run or jumped?

While more than a few boomers jump to defend themselves, and their cohorts, they don’t have the springs anymore.

Most people think of baby boomers and see the Sixties; they see Woodstock, Vietnam, protesting, marching, voting.

They don’t see the behind-the-scenes work that put a man on the moon, or the work writers did to define the era.

Lithub.com included Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five on the list, the same Kurt Vonnegut who read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and took offense at the opening line:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”

From thenation.com:

“I like ‘Howl’ a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first — and after that biochemistry. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.”

Kurt was born in 1922; Allen born in 1926. Guys in the same generation talking trash the way it should be. What was their demographic called?

The Greatest Generation

Dear Young Peoples,

If you want to engage in generational slamming, start with your own. To do otherwise creates a label no one wants to wear on their forehead: “Whiner.”

I’m an OK Boomer and I’m a whiner, and not that proud of it. I didn’t get the Sting-Ray bike I wanted for Christmas; I didn’t get the stereo I wanted in high school; I dropped out of college four times before I graduated; I joined the Army at its lowest point; My girlfriends dumped me; I got married in radioactive Chernobyl rain; my parents got old.

What else? “Ok boomer” is a perfect response to whining, entitled, behavior. Just do it better. We’re watching and hoping and dreaming you’ll do it better.

Until then boomers will continue to screw things up.

Here’s an idea on the way out: Register to vote, tell your friends to register to vote, explain the idea of “voice of a generation” to them if you understand the meaning of the vote.

If not, expect more images of wrinkled, jowly, lead-footed, baggy suited, ghouls to show up on your phone, tablet, laptop, podcast, streaming video, and every other device.

The horror show of life changes with each new generation. Draw a better picture and put yourself in it. While you’re at it, leave room for this boomer blogger and boomerpdx.

Can you do that? Thank you in advance, to use a sweet passive-aggressive boomer cliche. (But, if you were raised by an ok boomer, you’re used to that.)

PS: I showed my wife the top image and she didn’t understand what it was trying to say. After I explained it, she said, “Yep, that’s me.”

Did the lady in the top pic solve her problem? Yes, she did. I’d bet on it.