It seems like there's a lot of dislike and contempt for "boomers" from "millennials"

[Scootaloo]

208. Well, as a millennial / X-er hybrid...

Depending on how you look I came in at the tail end of one or the head start of the other, so... I lean more punk than hipster, so I guess file me closer to Gen x.

1) Boomers didn't do a fucking thing to end the Vietnam war. NO. THING. You know how Europeans feel when Americans strut around demanding praise for "Winning World War 2"? That's sort of how the rest of us feel when Boomers do this. No. Sorry, that war went on for nine fucking years and killed over fifty thousand Americans, and probably over a million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. You think burning a draft card and having a sing-along in the mud stopped the war? no, the Veitnamese won the damn war, and that's why we stopped fighting it. This is a weird conceit of Boomerism that transcends the right / left boundary - whatever hte reason for the war ending, it had nothing to do with the Vietnamese.

2) Gay rights, civil rights, and some amount of women's rights happened concurrently with the boomer years. Correlation does not equal causation, however, and with few exceptions, the leading figures of these movements were not boomers. Rosa Parks was born in 1913, Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1929, Harvey Milk in 1930, Alice Rossi in 1922, Betty Friedan 1921, Morris Kight in 1919, Dale Jennings, 1917, Coretta Scott King, 1927, Medgar Evers 1923, Russel Means, 1939, Cesar Chavez, 1927 - these people were not Boomers, they were the boomers's parents. I'm sorry, but nodding and saying "right on" when you heard them speak doesn't actually put you in their class, folks.

3) The organic food movement actually began in the early 1900's. Granted it was a mostly European thing, and Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" helped it cross the Atlantic. By the way, she was born in 1907, she was some boomers' grandparent.

If course, while taking all the credit for all this stuff they didn't do, it's worth noting that they refuse to take blame for the bad shit that happened concurrently as well. It's perfectly logical that if we can attribute a baby boomer who was ten years old when King spoke in Washington with all the ribbons and accolades King himself is worth... then we might as well blame the same boomer for the shot that went through King's skull just four years later. But no, it's all of the good, none of the bad. everything bad is their parents' fault. Or their kids fau;t.

The baby boomers are, in essence, eternally fifteen. They may have the body of a middle-aged walmartapottamus, but in their heads they're some Time magazine photo they once saw of an attractive hippy at Woodstock (Even if hte Boomer never left Plano, Texas and was a Goldwater Kid before being a Reagan Democrat.) They also seem to carry the child's sense of entitlement - they deserve all the credit, none of the blame, and have a frothing tantrum if you ever call them on it.

The attitude is annoying enough. But then you sit back and look at what they actually have accomplished? Not much of it is admirable, i'm sorry to say.

First, they squandered whatever savings - political, economic, ecological - that was left them by their own parents. Who, let's be fair, weren't exactly model stewards of such things themselves. But those folks at least understood that it was a hard fight for even that much. Did the boomers keep up the fight? Well... No. In fact a large number of them seem to have made it the point of their existence to utterly eradicate such things. We mostly call these people Republicans, these days (In fact, check it out - Most of the Republicans you hate? They were born after 1946, and are clumped between 46 and 60 - they're boomers, y'all. Keep Limbaugh in mind next time you preen about your generation)

But even for those who didn't make it their goal - and I'm happy to admit there were many who tried, in some way, to reverse such problems - most were just... Well, they lived about as you'd expect. Eat, shit, spend, eat, shit, spend. Who cares if the labor strength your parents nad grandparents fought for is slipping away, you're too hip for a job that doesn't involve making pumpkin bread art. Who cares if your lifestyle is stripping hte planet's resources and causing greater demand for human suffering in the third world - out of sight, out of mind!

Yup, to sustain and expand the lifestyle they demand but can't really afford, boomers are working so very hard to put the bill on their kids and grandkids. It's like they think they're on an eternal cruise and the rest of us exist to scrape their twelve-appletini vomit out of the carpet for them.

I suppose that's forgivable - It's how most people of any generation live, more or less just staring at their own feet as they shuffle from birth to death. But most people of other generations don't shriek about what wonderful, magnificent, exceptional people they are, worthy of all honor and no shame, in the fashion the boomers do. When you're going to waggle your finger about "like, civil rights and organic food, man" make sure you weren't one of the assholes shanking people last week in a Wal Mart feeding frenzy. or one of the people sponging profit from that feeding frenzy (Walton kids - kids no more, Boomers one and all.)

Basically it boils down to the fact that I'm going to inherit a denuded landscape because you wanted your eat-and-shit, where there are no labor rights because you weren't interested at the time and now you don't want to pay more than three bucks for your eat-and-shit, where brown and Muslim people can be murdered for the hell of it because you're scared to death of them and can't understand the concept of white entitlement, where god only knows what's in the food because - again, you don't want to spend more than a few bucks for your crap - and where, eventually, we will need to figure out where to put ten million double-wide corpses once the toxic cocktail you suck down to convince yourself that you're immune to aging reaches its limit. I'd say toss 'em to the sharks, but at this rate, there won't be any.

That'd be bad enough - and it is - but I have to hear this constant prattle about what world-saving wonderfucks you are, because you happened to be converting oxygen to carbon dioxide at the same time as the Stonewall Riots were happening.

No generation is angelic, and I certainly claim no such title for my own (whichever it is.) But for fuck's sake, enough with the breaking oyur arm to pat your own back about shit you never did, folks.

And yes, I know I will get a lot of hair-pulling and yowling over this. Oh well, I expect no different from people so invested in their own fantastical greatness.