The Editor's Mess

Back when truth or accuracy still mattered, I was not a “boomer.” I was part of the greatest generation ever conceived: Gen-X. We told this to ourselves all the time. And everyone else listened too because we were in that “magic quadrant” of consumerism: that 18-24 year old sweet spot where every advertiser tries to sell you everything, so they listen to everything you say, like a guy at a bar trying to get into your pants. All the attention makes you feel special, not that we needed any help in that department.

Meanwhile, the real jerks were the hippie “boomers,” the generation before us, which screwed up everything and had love-ins throughout college, unlike us who were stuck in computer lab. They were the reason we were never going to see a dime of social security. They were the reason we had global warming. They were the reason why the job market sucked so bad, the “worst in a generation.” In short, they sucked.

If you had any doubts then, just ask us, we’d tell you: boomers sucked.

Over the years, largely thanks to the children that we Gen-Xers ended up having, something weird happened. We weren’t paying attention: tbh, we were too busy creating the internet, and figuring out all sorts of ways to use it so that Google pretty much owned everything. We’re not sure how that happened either, because, like I said, we really weren’t paying attention. Call it a generational blind-spot from the folks that brought you A.D.H.D. Actually, we brought you a whole series of pathologies for what used to be called fidgeting, which was something kids did until your mom slapped you and you stopped. Can’t build big pharma on slaps, y’all.

See, I wasn’t even paying attention in that last paragraph, which started out talking about the weird thing that happened. The weird thing was, one day, our kids started calling us “boomers.” Not just us, pretty much everyone a few weeks older than whoever said it all the way up to our parents’ age. They didn’t care about generational labels. They never read ANY of the generation wars books made so popular in the 90s and early 2000s. Or any books, for that matter, but that’s another thing.

Specifically, I was called a “boomer.” It was hard not to feel really insulted, which happens a lot with this passive-aggressive generation. They pride themselves on how inclusive they are as cover for doing whatever they want pretty much all of the time, and then make up stuff like “post-truth society” when they naturally feel ashamed of all the selfish things they’re doing or insults they’re passively slinging. They think they invented passive-aggressiveness, and until someone writes a 500 word or less post somewhere online refuting it, they’ll keep on believing.

“Boomer”? Really? Me? In their omnipresent lazy shorthand, “boomer” is a generic term for anyone older than them who they want to insult, but not too badly. Lumping us in with all those jerks who really ARE boomers is an effective insult, but they don’t care about that, they just think it’s funny to label people who “don’t get it.” Gives them something to do in between cancelling entertainers for saying stupid crap 20 years ago and creating anti-cyberbullying campaigns, while hammering some Ritalin with a Red Bull-vodka.

Sorry to break it to you, kids, but we did the same thing too, and even used the same term, except for us it was calling someone the boomer that they, in fact, were. Every generation comes up with disparaging terms for the +1 generation. It’s natural. And it’s going to happen to you, with whatever unholy nightmares you’re raising right now in this post-truth, functionally illiterate, virtually agoraphobic, “actually talking about starting another civil war and driving Chevy Suburban EVs to the battlefield” world.

I’d say at this point how poetic it would be if they called you “Xers,” but they probably won’t. “Millennial” has too many syllables. My guess is that they’ll probably just call you “boomers” too, grandpa, because they’ll know how that’ll really piss you off. Enjoy!