I am right at the very end of baby boomers as I was born in the early 1960s. And I can tell you I don’t feel powerful at all. I was laid off twice in my 50s in what was clearly age discrimination in both cases. Dismissing the problems of older people when you are younger is just plain short sighted. If you live long enough, you will face those problems too.
I’m sorry to hear that you were laid off like that. Age discrimination is an unfortunate reality these days, particularly in the tech industry. I am not for dismissing the problems experienced by older people, nor am I for dismissing the problems of younger folk when you are older. I don’t think ‘OK Boomer’ is generally dismissing anyone’s problems, although it is often used to dismiss someone’s reaction when their reaction is more along the lines of the latter.
And respectfully, how powerful one member of a group feels is not a good measure of the power or influence of that group. I’m sure there were lots of white Americans that didn’t feel powerful during the days of segregation, but they were quite undeniably privileged and advantaged nonetheless. So my question to you would be, what makes Millennials or younger generations a “more powerful” group as opposed to Boomers?
Economically and financially, Millennials as a group are by no means more powerful. Along those measures, Boomers surpass every other recent generation by quite a lot, even including the Silent Generation. The age gap in federal workers versus those in the private sector has skewed disproportionately in favor of Boomers for at least a couple decades now, and it’s no secret they’ve been the dominant force in Congress for a good while. The fact that some Boomers are in their 70s or retired doesn’t change these facts about their relative position as a group to economic, financial, and political power.
A quick look at some of the words that used to be used to mean “special” can show how this works. Even in my life time, the word “retarded” was a polite word. The word “idiot” was invented to be used as a polite word for Psychological diagnoses. The term “idiot savant” survives from that time. Clearly, “boomer” is a dismissive term.
Were they polite words, though? I think if we look more closely at the history of words like “retard” and “idiot,” we’d find those were never as polite as people remember them to be. Polite words are kind words, not just words that carry no obviously negative connotation. “Sir” and “Ma’am” are polite words, whereas “retard” and “idiot” have always been used to imply something lacking or lesser in the persons they were said to refer to, whether that’s a lack in intelligence, speech, or what have you. That using those words didn’t use to upset so many people does not mean those were ‘polite’ words back then. It just means there was no cultural push-back.
“Boomer” never started out the same way, and it is literally referring to a group of people with a term that they came up with for themselves. I still don’t see how ‘OK Boomer’ is dismissing all the problems of Boomers, or how anyone can reach that conclusion unless they’re completely divorcing the phrase from any of the context it’s used in. What probably feels dismissive about it is that young people are saying ‘OK Boomer’ to older adults who talk down to them, lecture them, and dismiss their concerns. This is in all the examples I provide in the essay. But this doesn’t make the term “Boomer” itself dismissive.
How many times have you said to a friend that doesn’t get it: OK, dude. OK, John. OK, Becky. The response is dismissive because of the context, not because the word you are using to name or identify the other person is or should be insulting to them.
