Only if you’re going strictly by birth rates. Culturally, someone who couldn’t vote until 1980 could not have had influence on what was happening in the late sixties and the seventies.
cmkeller, that was never meant to be a slogan. It was one thing Jack Weiner said in a long interview. It was the generation above Boomers who **claimed ** that was what Boomers believed, so as to discredit them.
And this, I think, is the Millennials’ number one complain against the Boomers: their attitude of “Things are fine right now. Who cares what happens 10 or 20 or 30 years from now? That’s not my problem; I won’t even be around then.”
Then you must not internet a lot. The phrase is already being used to try and shut down anyone with a differing viewpoint. I very rarely see it used against anyone who is an actual boomer. Even on platforms where the age of users is very apparent.
When you complain that you are Gen X and not a boomer don’t be surprised when the reply is “OK boomer.”
Yeah, but the entire point is that the Baby Boomers DIDN’T leave the world a better place than they found it.
It’s the attitude, not the age that triggers this particular response. When you are trying to work to make things better and certain folks just won’t shut the fuck up about how everything is good enough as is you just get tired of having to entertain these people.
OK, Boomer is an excellent dismissal and a quick way of saying if you can’t respect younger folks positions on important topics then you should not expect younger people to respect your position. If you aren’t going to help then the least you can do is get the fuck out of the way.
Why wait? If the so-called millennials are the planet’s saviors they don’t need mommy’s permission to get started.
But they do need the climate change deniers currently making public policy to stop undermining every environmental regulation and treaty. They do need the people whose only response to every school shooting is to offer thoughts and prayers to either do something more constructive or get out of the way. They need the people who benefit from the status quo to stop carrying out vast and well-funded media smear campaigns every time a young person dares to suggest that maybe we could do things better. And they need a large portion of the population to stop voting for the people who are actively making things worse.
No worries, it’s pretty much a US thing. I just thought more people might get it. Seems only a few of us do.
“Boomer Sooner” is the fight song for the University of Oklahoma. It’s common for one alumni to shout “Boomer!” and another to respond “Sooner!”. Finally, OK is the two letter abbreviation for Oklahoma, so that’s how I make the connection.
In New Zealand, it apparently shares the new meaning – https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/11/05/ok-boomer-year-old-lawmaker-shuts-down-heckler-during-climate-change-speech/
Member of Parliament Chlöe Swarbrick, delivering a speech about climate change, responded to a heckler in the chamber with the retort “Okay, boomer.”
I get the “OK Boomer” part, but what does “sooner” have to do with it?
See Post #68.
True, but they still have to pry the reins of power from the cold, grey claws of smug, old nihilists.
That’s true, of course, but I have to say I prefer it to the dismissive phrase which is generally tossed at me: “Racist, sexist, clueless old white guy.”
What power? I mean, just because the President, the three leading candidates to replace him, the Speaker of House and the Senate Majority Leader are all in their seventies…
They don’t need mommy’s permission. They need the old folks to get the fuck out of the way so they have space to operate and the ability to actually make changes without constantly being undermined by folks who want to see things change only after they are dead.
Or , what Gyrate and Inigo Montoya said…
It’s as equally excellent a reply as calling someone a snowflake to shut them up.
May I mention as an aside, even as a Boom/X cusper on the slight Boomer side, those are annoying. Very often, Millennials aren’t what’s killing (X), Boomers getting old is killing (X). Or just plain technological obsolescence, cultural displacement, having to satisfy stockholder short-term demands, and so on.
Then make that case to those people who hold that attitude.
The USA is not the world and the accumulation of wealth is not the sole metric of “better”
This response is targeted specifically at the people with that attitude. The people who want to use the same old debunked arguments, who just want to basically troll younger people. It’s for the people who like to drop “But he never produced the birth certificate” or “He’s secretly a Muslim [or better yet, Moslem]” into conversations about Obama, or who refuse to acknowledge that a difference exists between pure socialism and a democratic socialist. It’s the tired response of a generation of people who get prompted to re-hash old arguments every time they turn around by someone who thinks they are clever on the internet.
The case has been made. The facts are out there for those receptive to them. Those who refuse to see them, and who continue to cling to the idea that it’s all just overblown, get dismissed by the people who want things to change for the better.