My generation, the one they call the “boomers” did some really fucked up things. Look what we have wrought. Is there a better example of our failures than our President. We have been in charge of a generation of time that has produced and seated clearly the worst leader in our country’s history.
And if that’s not enough, how about what we’ve done to the environment? Our kids not only have to worry about the health of the planet today, but also whether it will even be around for their kids. As they say about us, “O.K. Boomer.”
But, despite all this, we haven’t been total failures. Whether by accident or because of the rule of stopped clocks, we actually did get some things right.
It is my 71stbirthday in a few weeks, born in 1948. The world I was born into barely compares to the one I’m in now. Not just technologically. Surely, over the past seven decades, gadgets have transformed our way of life. I’m talking, though, about things larger than that. I’m talking about our attitudes, the way we see the world which, in many ways, I think we’ve made better.
Most of us take for granted now social conditions that would have been unthinkable seventy-one years ago. Ironically, I am reminded of this as I now watch the painful (in many ways) Impeachment hearings. The House Committee is populated with numerous women and African-Americans, and today this is not unusual. It would have been unthinkable in 1948. Gay marriage is now legal or recognized in every state. My own son is one of those who enjoyed that right. One of the expert witnesses in the hearing I am watching today is gay. Unthinkable in 1948. College dorms are co-ed. Unthinkable in 1948. The entire college I went to in 1966 wasn’t even co-ed. People commonly live together without marriage and often have children. Unthinkable in 1948. Watching TV as a child, the bedrooms of married couples in sitcoms had to sleep separately in twin beds. Today, if you look hard enough on TV, you can find beds with twins sleeping together.
In race and gender and gay and sexual freedom rights we can and should do more, but that doesn’t negate what we have done. There are surely those who oppose the changes we have made, but their numbers are dwindling.
So, while I am frustrated by some of the deeds of our generation, I also rejoice in others. I repeat, then, the phrase now employed against us, but this time in a wholly different sense: “O.K., Boomer.”
We were right 