May your grandchildren say the same thing about you.
So it’s reasonable to brush that across the whole group?
Can you think of other contexts (other groups) where that would be acceptable?
Maybe not acceptable, but lots of boomer comments here about millenials and their supposed entitlement.
I think that’s a potentially interesting, but separate topic: “Is it acceptable to fight a prejudice by creating a new opposing prejudice?”
I thought you were specifically asking about the term Boomer. Are you asking whether broad generalizations against old people is ageism? Yes, yes it is.
If they weren’t calling you Boomer on your YouTube channels, they’d be calling you grandpa or something.
As a Gen-Xer, I wish that people cared about us enough to hold us in contempt. We’re basically beneath contempt.
Broad generalisations against older people, using the label ‘boomer’, which seems to quite a few to make it excusable.
Or we could regard people as, you know, people, individuals with their own good and bad points, instead of making sweeping generalizations about generations. You might as well judge people by their zodiac sign.
Karen Boomers are the worst.
I stopped poking fun an millennials/zoomers a few years back when it dawned on me that they were getting all sorts of undeserved flack. I work with millennials, and a few zoomers on occasion, and for the most part they’re pretty good people. What great fun it was to introduce a millennial at work to the classic “Convoy” by C.W. McCall and see her shocked expression upon learning they based a movie off the song!
I guess that’s at least a little personal growth. Now think about not poking fun at groups of people at all.
I think it’s ageism to criticize a person based on his age. Boomer is just a neutral term that refers to people of a certain age. In my opinion, the meaning of Boomer hasn’t morphed into a negative term in itself.
“Look at that Boomer, can’t even set his VCR clock”
“Look at that grandpa, can’t even set his VCR clock”
“Look at that old guy, can’t even set his VCR clock”
Those are all equivalent terms to me, all ageist, but not because they use the term Boomer or grandpa or whatever.
I’m not sure it is a separate issue; I think that it’s a backlash to the class that has been entitled and oppressive. A reckoning is inevitable.
The Karen thing is an interesting topic, obviously unkind to people who happen to be called Karen, but it’s a valid grouping. If it was called ‘entitled and demanding idiots’, it would be a perfectly reasonable generalisation of the group, because membership of the group is defined by the explicit behaviour that is being criticised.
I don’t think so. It’s okay to poke fun at millennials, it’s okay to poke fun at gen-X, and it’s okay to poke fun at boomers. What’s not okay is to dismiss millennials as being whiny crybabies with an overinflated sense of entitlement especially when not taking into account the difficulties they do face such as a poor job market or crushing student loan debts.
Is it fair to visit that reckoning upon the whole group, including those who are not responsible for whatever it is you need to pay back?
Again, I don’t know that it is fair, but it is inevitable when a group occupies an oppressive position in a society for decades. Once their hold starts to slip, there is going to be a backlash. Like I said, people on this very board often engaged in millenial bashing, gleefully and with little if any pushback. Did you call that out?
So if I was born in 1946 you’d prefer I not run for office? People voted for these candidates, and not because of a “boomer sense of entitlement.”
The “generation” seems to me to be irrelevant. I get thinking someone may be too old, but not objecting that “their values were shaped by the years they grew up.”
There are good boomers (me, Elton John and Obama) and bad boomers (insert your least favorite here), so the term really is meaningless other than as a shortcut to describe age.
I’m not offended in the least since 1) I’ve never encountered such an insult in real life, and 2) it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if I did.
It’s possible that I didn’t perceive it as a problem, and of course that would be bad.
I do recall being, despite my age, on the side of concern about some of the issues that ‘boomers’ are criticised as having caused. I recall a time when this board seemed to have a leaning toward climate change denialism, for example. I don’t think anything I would have done would have been effective in turning that around.
Dunno, but for the record, one of my (college-aged) students characterized Edmund Burke (b. 1729) as a “Boomer.” I’m not sure it has much to do with literal generations at all anymore…
I’m going to stop you there.
Youtube comments aren’t indicative of anything but what words teens with too much time on their hands will find most hurtful., not any actual prejudices they may or may not hold. If you were a woman, half the comments would be misogynist. If you were a minority race, half the comments would be about that. It’s just ASBOs with keyboards.