I missed that thread the first time around, but wow, things got ugly. It does contain a great post by Manda JO , which predictably seems to have gotten completely ignored.
I don’t really have an opinion on boomer-as-human-beings, but I will sure as shit be glad to see the end of boomers-as-lazy-media-shorthand. There’s a reason things like “gen X” and “gen Y” or whatever have never really caught on in the way “boomers” did: it’s stupid and facile to try to reduce the zeitgeist to a catchy name, and then use that made-up category to talk as if there’s this cohesive category that somehow share more with each other than with any number of other groupings.
The terrible legacy of the *idea *of the boomers is the idea that your generation is what defines you, that your peer group is the only place where you will find recognition and acceptance and meaning and identity. It’s an idea that’s lead to a host of cultural changes that keeps kids separated from teens separated from 20-somethings separated from 30-somethings onwards and upwards. Each little age group is left to socialize each other in weird little incestuous closed loops, and that, I firmly believe, is socially destructive.
I really hope that as the boomers die out this whole way of looking at the world will die out as well: it really takes a critical mass of each age division to sustain.