As a person of the age where people on Reddit say I shouldn’t be allowed to drive any more (or even continue to live, according to some), I’m an actual Boomer, at least by the original definition, having been born in 1951. Unsurprisingly, I am very annoyed when people talk about boomers, mostly because they are complaining about someone I don’t recognize.
Apparently, “boomers” lecture their kids about debt and tell them to get a job and stop ordering takeout, so they can afford to buy a house when no one can buy a house. They say they did it, so anyone can. Boomers don’t understand technology, and are relentlessly naive about scammers. They vote Republican and watch Fox. They talk about how awful kids are these days, and they are sour about everything. They are elected politicians who refuse to step down despite signs of dementia (When they talk about politicians, they don’t seem to mean Bernie Sanders, mind you).
Boomers sound like awful people. I am quite sure they exist. I am not one of them.
I paid off my kid’s education loans, bought them a house, and keep trying to get them to let me give them money (they refuse). I don’t own a vacation home or a boat. I have been using computers since the 1960s, have my own domain (though I no longer build it with HTML as I once did), and have owned every gadget, PDA, iPhone, wireless device, and computer that I could afford since they brought out Palm Pilots. I vote Democratic, I don’t own a television, I’m a progressive socialist who goes to demonstrations and donates money to candidates and organizations, and I never use AI. I have tattoos and piercings, which came as quite a surprise to my fellow classmates in the senior citizen French class. I gave up my car several years ago, and get around by bus. Money has been tight most of my life; I am still not quite sure why I’m okay now.
Just as with any other demographic group, one hell of a lot of the actual Boomers don’t fit the mold. Those people are on the bus with me when I go to demonstrations, most of them carrying signs. Or they are still working, in their seventies, because they have always been poor, sometimes because they’re Black, sometimes because awful things happened to them.
When people talk about “boomers,” though, they often mean their own parents, who are apparently complacent and insufferable. I am not their parents.
They also mean a certain type of white middle-class asshole, a type that spans all the generations and is everywhere. But “boomers” is a convenient slur, one that doesn’t even mean people my age any more, now that the millennials and Gen X are getting older. And people do love to have someone to blame.
I am complaining here because I am, in fact, a cranky old person. and because complaining does come with the territory. But I refuse to be anyone’s damn boomer.