Please don't offend snowflake boomers

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I think that whole OK Boomer thing is very dismissive of baby boomers and their life experiences. I also think it dismisses the knowledge and experience that boomers have in life.

I think that whole OK Boomer thing is very dismissive of baby boomers and their life experiences. I also think it dismisses the knowledge and experience that boomers have in life.

the engine of our history, in a nutshell- "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." (g. michael hopf)

'don't trust anyone over 30'.

^^^i don't believe in royalty either, but i seem to be quickly becoming a minority compared to the millions upon millions here who seem to want a royal dictator.

i like monarchies. i like the idea of an unpolitical figurehead who can step in whenever the PM or such goes awry and i like the inherent sense of continuity that comes with monarchies i wonder if thailand will keep theirs for long.

^^^i don't believe in royalty either, but i seem to be quickly becoming a minority compared to the millions upon millions here who seem to want a royal dictator.

well that's the IDEA, anyway.

half my friends are over 30

Jack Weinberg uttered the phrase – which became one of the most memorable expressions of the turbulent 1960s era – during the height of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement was a struggle by students over the right to engage in political speech on campus, which helped to catalyze broader political activism on campuses around the country over student rights, civil rights and the Vietnam War.

In a news release recently distributed by a Chicago public relations agency – owned by his wife, it should be noted – Weinberg says he made the statement primarily to get rid of a reporter who was bothering him. He doesn’t even regard the statement as the most important thing he’s ever said.

“I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter and he kept asking me who was ‘really’ behind the actions of students, implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by the Communists or some other sinister group,” Weinberg recalled.

“I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.”

A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the quote and other newspapers across the country picked it up.

“It went from journalist to journalist, then leaders in the movement started using it because they saw the extent it shook up the older generation,” Weinberg said.

“I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings.”

A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the quote and other newspapers across the country picked it up.

“It went from journalist to journalist, then leaders in the movement started using it because they saw the extent it shook up the older generation,” Weinberg said.

Over the ages, generations have competed, criticized and looked condescendingly down on each other. Most of us know for certain that our own generation is just right. Those older are clueless geezers and hopelessly out of it. Those younger are lazy, pampered spoiled brats who don’t appreciate the hardships we endured when we were their age.

I’m a boomer. Later generations look at us as a bunch of smug, self-satisfied types who rode rising stock and real estate markets to financial paradise and then yanked up the ladder so that younger people, drowning in college debt, were totally shut out of the American Dream.

oomers, repaying the compliment, tend to view those who followed us as self-absorbed, hand-crafted-mocha-latte-sipping, technology-obsessed, phone-staring, ridiculously tattooed, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing, layabouts whose greatest desire is to spend the rest of their lives smoking medical marijuana in their parents’ basements.

And of course, we’re all right.

I never cared one way or the other about all this intergenerational sniping … until now.

We boomers have put up with a lot of malarkey from self-congratulatory Gen Z types as they remake the world into something impersonal, intolerant, unrecognizable and all but unlivable, with their heads buried in their smartphones and their misguided conviction that there’s an app for everything that matters.

We tolerate their naiveté because we were young once, too. But we can’t even get through to them because their earbuds are cemented to their ears and they’re spending every waking moment staring, Narcissus-like, at their social media feeds.

Yet somehow that “OK, Boomer” thing put me over the edge.

I’m mad as hell at the younger generations. If you’re part of this group, I want to tell you why you’ve screwed up a perfectly great world, and just what you need to do next.

You spend your days staring into screens. By contrast, we make eye contact and therefore have empathy and real connection with other human beings.

You have hooking up. We have relationships.

You swipe right. We live right.

You have Apple watches, where all you do is look at your timelines. We have neighborhood watches, where we look out for each other.

You live to get likes. We live for love.

You have influencers. We have thinkers.

You have politicians. We had statesmen.

We make commitments. You rent your furniture.

We win awards for accomplishments. You expect participation ribbons just for showing up.

You have Facebook friends. We have real friends.

We have tolerance. You have cancel culture.

On college campuses, we had open discourse and free speech. Today, you have a McCarthyism of the left and “trigger words,” because any idea you don’t agree with sends you screaming for crayons and teddy bears.

We won the Cold War. You guys have never met a left-wing totalitarian dictator from Castro to Maduro who you didn’t like.

When it comes to personal finance, we balance our checkbooks. You don’t even know how much you spend at Starbucks. (Hint: a lot).

You have McJobs. We have careers.

Culture? Same thing. We have classic music from the 1960s and 1970s – the Beach Boys, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Motown legends, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, ZZ Top and many more. You have Billie Eilish and other whiny balladeers who can only write songs about how some dope you met in the club won’t return your texts.

OK, Gen Z’ers, I get it. You’re in a squeeze because of student loans, and, yes, it looks like our generation pulled up the ladder. But that’s just like you kids to play the victim card. In truth, every generation has it hard, just in different ways.

You actually have the benefit of disintermediation, a word that didn’t exist when we were your age.

On Amazon, Etsy, Fiver, Upwork, and other sites, you can sell your ideas, creations, books, and time to markets all over the planet without ever having to create a resume or get a job. By contrast, we had to prove ourselves to gatekeepers and bosses, working our way up slowly, instead of starting tech companies and becoming gazillionaires not long after hitting puberty.

Pro-tip, as you young folks like to say: The next time you see gray hair, think of it as a sign meaning “Information Center.” We boomers didn’t get where we are by hanging around coffee shops and staring at Instachat and Snapface.

We earned everything we have, from our careers to our marriages to our houses to our 401(k)s. And if you can get over your own youthful arrogance and ask us, we might just tell you how we did it.