OK Boomer

A dismissal of my musical taste by a young person yesterday prompts me to expand a bit on my last blog. (I smiled at the dismissal.) 
 
Though the verbal equivalent of an eye-roll, the “OK Boomer” mantra from exasperated Zoomers is not really an insult. It may be intended as such but it isn’t, for Boomers are generally pretty secure (rightly or wrongly) in their opinions on everything from music to lifestyles. I think part of that has to do with history.
 
Contrasting generations is a pastime in all eras. The conclusions are always somewhat misleading since every age group contains people across a wide spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. But if we acknowledge that we are talking about the centerline of bell curves with tails that overlap, generational comparisons still can have merit. Some generations really are (on average) more industrious than others, or technically adept than others, or strait-laced than others, or whatever. The technological environment accounts for more of the differences than we usually recognize, argues Jean Twenge in her book Generations, which is full of arcane data and graphs. Silents (b.1926-1945), for example, grew up with radio, vinyl records, and movies. Boomers (b.1946-1964) were the first television generation. Xers (1965-1980) experienced cable TV and early personal computers in their youths. Millennials (1981-1996) grew up with the internet. Zoomers (1997-2012) grew up with smart phones. The oldest Zoomer was 10 when the iPhone appeared and the youngest doesn’t remember a time without it.

 
I don’t disagree with Twenge’s basic point. I think those technologies and numerous others have had a profound impact on the youth of each era. But I think that Boomers also have a peculiar relationship with broader history purely by the accident of their birth years. To some degree this is true of Silents, too, though their numbers are diminishing rapidly while the GI Generation is gone but for a few centenarians. Attrition is taking its toll on Baby Boomers as well, but there are a lot of us so we’ll remain a cultural force for a while.
 
The future arrived in the 20^th century. To be sure, its mechanical, scientific, and social foundations were laid centuries earlier and the above-ground framing of it accelerated in the 19^th, but the structure took real recognizable shape in the 20^th. Technology changed traditional lifestyles forever. The experience of my paternal grandfather (b. 1896) illustrates the point. He left Austria-Hungary shortly before World War 1 in a horse-drawn hay wagon. He returned to Budapest for a visit five decades later in a Boeing 707. Manned heavier-than-air flight was just a fantasy when he was born. He lived to see Gemini spacecraft orbit the earth (though he missed seeing the moon landing by a few years). My other grandparents were born in 1899, 1900, and 1900. All lived on farms for at least part of their adult lives.
 
Though Boomers experienced only the second half of the century first-hand, we personally knew those who had lived through the first half. I know the story of my maternal grandfather’s army physical for World War 1. (His induction was canceled when the war ended in 1918.) I heard about the transition from literal horse power to mechanical power; as late as the 1930s my paternal grandfather dug cellars with a draft horse and scoop. I heard all about the hardship and angst of the Depression, about my dad’s experiences in World War 2, and (from my mom) what high school was like in the 1940s. My parents played big band music on the stereo when I was a kid. I heard about rationing from those who experienced it and about genuine horrors of war from immigrant survivors of them who were friends and neighbors. All of this was from the mouths those who experienced it directly – not third-hand from literary sources – which makes it feel very real. I won’t mention the events Boomers experienced first-hand, since we spend plenty of time talking about those (often nostalgically) so there is no need to repeat all that here. The point is that none of the 20^th century seems very distant to me. I knew people who were around at the beginning of it. (I incorporated some of their recollections into my own short stories, as in How to Avoid Work and Flirt with the Butcher.) The arrival of the future between 1900 and 1999 feels personal.
 
I think this gives Boomers a sense of place in history that adds to their already high regard for themselves. It probably also accentuates in us the natural tendency of those over a certain age to be resistant to further change. We have become dinosaurs. That’s OK. Dinosaurs lasted 180 million years. They must have done something right. Theory of a Deadman needn’t worry so much.
 

Theory of a Deadman – Dinosaur