"Ok, Boomer"

The great irony of the meme 'Ok, Boomer' is that by the very nature of memes, if you employ a meme to criticize a generation, you are that meme. In other words:

Had you been born between 1946 and 1964, you would be a 'Boomer'.

Which is such a banal truism, I'm confident the point would be missed. I'm not sure how to articulate it better. Perhaps a few more examples would help:

If you were in your 20's in the early 90's you would be making 'not jokes'.

If you were in your 20's in the late 90's you would be listening to 'Nu Metal'.

If you were in your 20's in the 80's you would have paid money to see Police Academy movies.

If you were in your 20's in the 80's you wouldn't do yoga, you would do aerobics. 

Of course, we can't argue the counterfactual, so these assertions of mine are opinion. However the idea bears entertaining I feel. The specific idea that if we were somehow able to displace you in time or perhaps even geographically, you would struggle to maintain your beliefs.

'Oh but that would be great tohm! if you could send me back to the start of the industrial revolution, I could warn everybody about climate change!' Yeah you could, but I'm talking about displacing you not as a cyborg sent back from the future with memories of how things pan out, but more if you were abducted at birth and raised in different circumstances.

I was watching the German Netflix sci-fi series 'Dark' that is about displacement in time. Without giving too much away, a kid goes missing in the present day and turns up in the 1980's. There's a scene though where the missing kid from 2018 is discovered in the 80's by his father who has managed to follow him through time, and the kid is wearing short jean-shorts, long socks and sandals.

This small detail had me question my very identity. Would I wear the socks and sandals? I mean I still for the most part dress like it's 1996. Fashion has by and large never worked for me since. But if I was 10? If I had no means by which to purchase my own clothing? Would I protest or go with it?

'Ok, Boomer' would be useful as a device to make salient that our beliefs are by and large products of our environment. In which case, it should work in both directions, but the very espousing of 'Ok, Boomer' indicates to me more a comforting exercise in blaming, the boomers are bumbling buffoons that have fucked up the planet, but we have it all figured out. 

In Melbourne, in the inner city, you can find on pretty close to every block a bubble tea shop. They sell sugary drinks in plastic cups, sealed with plastic lids that are punctured with a plastic straw. You can also find in abundance, cafes that serve people coffee in their reusable 'keep cups'.

Would a white office worker with their keep cup turn around to a Chinese international student sipping on their bubble tea and say 'Ok, China.'? While privately I'm sure they feel superior, I doubt they'd feel comfortable laying into the Chinese. If the two individuals were the same age though, I sincerely doubt the keep-cup toting white person would imagine they wouldn't give a shit about single use plastic consumption had they been born in China.

But chances are, they wouldn't.

It is a conceit of hindsight we often make that we would have realized Bruce Willis was dead in the 6th Sense, that the memories in the Arrival were in fact taking place in the future, and that we would have been among the very few Boomers that took Climate Change seriously, argued for greater representation in Studio Movies and accepted our child's demigender non-binary status. 

More to the point, many of us assume that were we to move from the inner city, progressive suburbs, to rural racist heartland that our political views wouldn't change.

And I doubt, they would change dramatically but perhaps more erode over time as one begins to sympathize with a community of different values. 'Ok, Boomer' is a bold declaration of an inability to sympathize, by people who precisely are in the best position to sympathize. Because you are jumping on the bandwagons of culture as and where they occur. There's no Homo Boomus and Homo Millenius.

My ancestors, better known as my Grandparents opposed the imperial expansions of Germany and Japan. Evidently they didn't sacrifice their lives, just youth and mental health, because they came back and had a boom of babies. But many of their peers and siblings did sacrifice their lives. There's a naive assumption we can make in the present day that the Allied forces opposed Hitler because Hitler had to be opposed because of the atrocities of the holocaust. We know Nazism to be bad because it represents the moral nadir of antisemitism. 

Watch the recent Churchill biopic 'Darkest Hour' though, and whatever intelligence the brits had on hand about the deportation of Jews and the death camps, it didn't really feature in the public psyche. The expansion of the Third Reich was opposed for it's imperialism, resistance to being ruled by a foreign power. 

Sovereignty was the reason for the resistance, and with little regard to the Jewish diaspora. In other words: the same kind of sentiments that vote for Brexit. It's quite probable that a bunch of Anti-Semites sacrificed their lives to liberate the Jewish people of Europe, where if but for the accident of their being born a British citizen rather than a German citizen, could have just as easily been posted to a death camp and gassed a bunch of innocent civilians.

And my Grandparents and their peers didn't go fight fascism in order that we be free to marry people of the same sex and open immigration up to Asians and Africans and Arabs, and vote to become a republic, and socialism... their good work, was not undertaken for contemporaneous good intentions, the product of the very freedom and sovereignty they preserved for us. It was for Queen and Country. 

Had my grandparents been born when I was, if someone asked them to lay down their life for queen and country, I imagine they would have said 'fuck off.' as I would.

I was watching the Franky Boyle's New World Order wrap up of 2019, and Sara Pascoe made an interesting point, that is under discussed when they were discussing Greta's UN Speech. She pointed out that she was taught about climate change (she's two years older than me) when she was a kid, then grew up and got busy. And yeah, Pascoe is a vegan, but she also has guested on Travel Man, a show that promotes 'mini-breaks' where one flies to a holiday destination for 48 hours, and we don't hit this up with 'Ok, millenial'

Mark Blyth has been one of the few to point out, that there's an emotional obstacle to climate action. And I invite you to sympathize. 

If you lived in the 1970's you would have been encouraged to go to University for free (In Australia). Going to University would have assured you employment in just about any field, at wages your parents could only have dreamed of and kept you out of Vietnam. It was all driven by the post-war expansions of international trade, manufacturing and fossil fuel driven technology improvements. Real wages had been rising, the middle class was growing. Women were becoming lawyers, engineers, professors. I've met them. There's no laptops, no mobile phones, no internet, no smart phones. If you were an architect or a graphic designer you worked with a set square, not photoshop and illustrator. If you wanted to fact check someone you had to go to the library and look up books via a card catalog, or have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica handy. 

You invested your life in dodging the draft and getting an education in one of the industries that were driving into a better and brighter future. Then in your late 20's you first hear on a Sunday news program about a scientific theory called 'the Greenhouse effect' this is the point where myself and Greta might be tempted to ask 'what did you do?' but we are very unsympathetic as to how obvious the answer would have been to people in their late 20s with two young children and a mortgage who had embarked on careers in the fossil fuel and manufacturing industry - hope it wasn't true.

And I fucking see the same behavior among my peers and contemporaries. There is a popular mass undertaking of social justice, that sure has nobler aims and intentions than industrial expansion. But like the scientists of the 1960's and 70's that first clued in to the hidden cost of greenhouse gases, there is a small, unpopular contingent of serious scientists that have done serious science, that have gone and actually looked at the facts on the ground, and through the microscope and run experiments and they are by and large dismissed by my generation, on so many subjects. And mirroring the climate denying fossil fueled skepticism, there are motivated bodies producing bogus theory and promoting it to preserve their self interest.

I do not know if I would have been a Nazi, had I grown up in Nazi Germany. I listened to Brett Weinstein interview Katie Hurzog where Katie made the interesting claim that she 'knows now I wouldn't be a Nazi in Nazi Germany' (paraphrasing) which was not the reflexive 'well I know I would never be a Nazi.' But more the considered conclusion of a process of much soul-searching, where I assume she concluded with confidence that she was the kind of person who is willing to die out of principle sooner than fit in or be accepted. Brett shares her conclusion, but points out 'we would have opposed it, and we would have died.' (paraphrasing).

And I guess I need to get to some kind of fucking conclusion eventually, so out of respect for Godwin, it may as well conclude with Nazism. This is the thing about the 'Ok, Boomer' meme that I find deliciously oblivious. It's missing the general for the specific. Focusing on the content of beliefs, rather than how those beliefs are obtained.

I was talking to one friend and reported that I knew people who self censored their opinions online. I forget how we got on the topic because our conversation had been so fragmented, but I remember the response was in the vicinity (paraphrasing) of 'well, it's not really a problem because often those kinds of opinions aren't worth sharing.' which I'll be honest, stunned me that anyone wouldn't self censor that opinion, and I was so stunned that I couldn't articulate a push back there and then, it was really blindsiding. I cannot infer a true intention of the statement but what I hear is 'well it's okay if people are unable to express dissenting views because I feel the dissent is illegitimate.' that's not a system. It's tribalism. Simple substitution makes it clear to me 'Well, we shouldn't be concerned if the people are too afraid to criticize the Chairman. The Chairman is a great leader.'

At another party, I was talking about my project to redesign my wardrobe as I transition into middle age and the interesting challenges it poses, and my friend said to me (paraphrasing) 'Well as what I assume is a straight cis man... I think you're going to be fine.' and though I understand the value of labels like cis, to build empathy and challenge the idea of designating 'normal' it was the first time I had a bemused reaction that at first was (this is my inner monologue) 'how cute, you earnestly believe we help each other out...' before graduating to 'that felt remarkably similar to "you Jews are good at making money, and you take care of your own now don't deny it!" sweet pre-holocaust form of Antisemitism.

That's just how I felt, and I feel confident both friends would be horrified to be compared to supporters of the worst endeavors of the 20th century. Nor to my knowledge have either typed the phrase 'Ok, Boomer' anywhere. And in case it needs pointing out, cisgendered heterosexual anglo-saxon men are not as vulnerable as the Jewish diaspora, or even communist dissidents. The people most vocal in attacking us, still have a tendency to marry us, have babies with us etc. 

Baby Boomers are not homogenous, just like every generation, and every other which way you try to slice your demographics. I'm sure climate change, attitudes toward sex and gender, views on immigration, superannuation and how to serve avocado on toast are not the only avenues by which one might feel tempted to post a dismissive 'Ok, Boomer' but it will always remain a self defeating dismissal, because you are demonstrating how ordinary you are and how much in your thinking or lack thereof, you resemble the very people you think you're dismissing.