Amerika

When a junior politician responded with “OK, Boomer” to an older member of the political body, it shocked a good many people when the rallying cry was taken up by others. They found it appalling that they could be totally disregarded so casually.

Boomers and others do not understand that they are disregarded because they are from another society, one that existed before all of the changes of the Glorious Leftist Revolution of the 1950s-1960s took over.

Since people rarely re-orient themselves to understand a world that came after the one they found when they first hit the age of maturity, Boomers are stuck in the world that was there when they were sixteen, which is the world of 1960-1964.

They have not had to deal with the world that has appeared since because they are already established in boring career jobs, houses, social roles, and investment plans. For them, this new world does not exist, and they refuse to acknowledge it (counterpoint: why would they? it’s awful).

For this reason, to those of us who came after that time, Boomers seem to be describing another world entirely, and this is not the world to which we must adapt and which we must address. After all, Boomers will be moving on soon and we will have to carry on.

Let us look at how the world has changed:

• Sexual liberation. Instead of men and women staying relatively chaste so that they could have lasting marriages, we have a sexual marketplace where people act solely for themselves. They meet up for sex or casual relationships, then finally “settle down” in a marriage that they plan to dissolve later because of the free alimony or the ability to have a sugar baby. Marriages last when in inverse proportion to the number of sexual partners someone has, so this means that for post-Boomer generations, the ideal of lifelong love is fleeting if not outright ludicrous.
• Women in the workforce. The more different groups you have in any situation, the less there is tacit agreement and the more everything must be discussed, papered with procedure, layered in bureaucracy, and made insufferable with endless pro forma “meetings.” Even more, women love details and adore tedium. Further, they are fierce competitors during the first part of their careers because they do well in education, which bores boys, especially intelligent ones. This creates a conformist, detail-oriented, and procedure-obsessed workplace.
• Diversity. The West, seeking to prove that it was morally better than others and therefore deserved its position as world leader, combined its rugged individualism, dualistic Christianity, and incipient Athenian liberalism into a dogma that placed human rights before all else, creating diverse societies. This was done by law; otherwise, the different groups tended to avoid each other and have their own sub-societies or “Chinatowns” within the West, and even that was far from ideal. With diversity, a business can be sued or face government fines for discrimination, so if a minority (ethnic, sexual, racial, religious, sexual preference) trots into the employment office at the same time a majority (ethnic Western European, heterosexual, masculine) individual does, the minority must be hired or the business is potentially discriminating through the legal doctrine of “disparate impact.” This means that white men, especially those who do not affirm the pro-diversity message, rarely get promoted. A case in point: all of our recent military promotions seem to be African-American females.
• Entitlements. The Boomers got in before the crushing tax burden of Medicare, Social Security, welfare programs, Obamacare, public schools and property taxes. They eventually paid taxes on those, but every program starts out cheap and gradually migrates toward unsustainably expensive. More importantly, those taxes had an effect on the workplaces, housing market, and social conditions under which people who followed came. Everything to more expensive; wages stagnated. The money went to government instead.
• Consumerism. Consumerism happens when government redistributes money to those for whom it is “free,” and therefore, they spend it wildly on consumer goods. Jobs programs like affirmative action, and bulky government pensions, also contribute to this. The programs of the 1960s continuing the “pump priming” Keynesian ideal of the 1930s and created a permanent group of spenders whose role was to prop up our economy by constantly buying new stuff and throwing out the old. In addition to being an ecological disaster, this also created an intolerably vapid society oriented toward the lowest common denominator. Boomers grew up in a world of quality tools, food, and construction, and are leaving behind a world of disposable junk which falls apart after a few decades.
• Globalism. Almost no one will call globalism what it really is, “post-colonialism.” Instead of a world ruled by Western Europe, which did a better job, we encouraged all of the former colonial states to take their place at the table, despite them not being ready for this. We embarked on “wealth transfer” programs to enrich them. In return, we have produced a world full of hostile groups which want to destroy us and each other.

More changes could be mentioned here, but these are the root. In the 1960s, the doctrine of the 1860s — civil rights, called “human rights” or “humanism” in an international context — took over our society because it enabled government to grow big and powerful, at the same time it empowered the overthrow of the old Anglo-Saxon hierarchy so that it could be replaced with new groups who want to take over the wealth made here and destroy those who made it.

This human pattern repeats in every dying society. It succeeds, therefore expands, and this means less quality control, so soon it has huge groups of discontented and helpless people who are angrily selfish because they know they are useless. Those take over, and then import others to help them, creating a new group which deposes and destroys the old.

“OK, Boomer” caught fire because to those of us living in the post-1960s world, a phenomenon which really only kicked in during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the vision of the world that the Boomers have is worse than illusory; it is obsolete.

They are speaking of a fantasy which denies the everyday reality in which we live, and consequently, we simply want to cut them out of the discussion as irrelevant. “OK, Boomer” is not an insult; it is a dismissal.

Tags: 1960s, 1990s, affirmative action, boomers, consumerism, disparate impact, diversity, entitlements, sexual liberation, women in the workforce