‘Dear boomer-bashers’

At the Saboteur 365 blog, Paladin Justice re-posts and discusses a rather ugly meme directed at — who else? — baby boomers. Who composed this little ‘love letter’ to boomers is not clear, but it’s a good example of the kind of venom that is so routine on the rightward side of the Internet.

As my long-time readers know, I’ve made efforts in the past to counter this nasty rhetoric, based as it is on some kind of visceral resentment and animus. I’ve posted actual data based on polls and surveys,  and argued based also on historical facts. Yet it seems a waste of time and effort on my part; this blog is too obscure to make any headway. Or my point-of-view is out of step with the postmodern zeitgeist.

Obviously much of the young right shares with their leftist age-cohort the unwillingness — or is it inability? — to consider facts and reality, preferring instead to respond by ‘la-la-la, I can’t hear you‘ and by continuing the barrage of name-calling. Example: calling baby-boomers ‘retarded.’ Such wit; such repartee!

Yes, I know it’s only rhetoric, immature though it is; surely these people know that standardized test scores have declined steadily since the boomers were in school, as I suspect IQ scores have. Certainly boomers got a better education, having had to learn actual history, geography, spelling, grammar, and maths — before the educational system was politically corrected and dumbed down. But that’s irrelevant; boomers are ‘retarded‘ because the “younger” people say so. So there. Nothing to do with facts or actual intelligence levels.

What response can I offer, or do I let this childish tantrum-throwing go unchallenged? Personally I hate lies; I’m surfeited with lies in this age of falsehoods. We should all hate lies.

But it would really require a book to refute even some of the falsehoods and canards that are spread around the Internet. One person cannot do an adequate job. I have noticed that fellow blogger ‘dfordoom‘ does a valiant job of trying to answer these bashers, for instance, on a recent thread at Sailer’s blog, where the accusations against boomers cropped up. If I could easily find that thread and ‘dfordoom’s comment, I would quote it, but I can’t locate it.

As best I can recall, he answered that boomers were not old enough to have ‘fought for” for the ‘civil rights’ movement, desegregation, etc., as the linked meme falsely asserts. Boomers (as Paladin Justice could confirm) were mostly still in school when these things were well on their way to being accomplished fact. The ‘Greatest Generation’ were largely in charge in those days. Just how could an age group who were teenagers or elementary-age children be held accountable? Thus anybody who blames boomers for those events shows their woeful ignorance of history. In this day and age of the Internet, there’s no excuse for that. Yet these historically illiterate statements just go on and on.

Multiculturalism? The 1965 Immigration Act (the Hart-Celler Act) ensured that the demographics of this country were to become more non-white. Boomers were not involved in that. Teens and children do not pass laws in Congress or ‘fight for’ racial integration.

For the record, once again, boomers did not account for a large percentage of people in high political office until the 90s, when the Clintons rose to power in 1992. And at 43 or so, Bill Clinton was a mere boy compared to most of the politically powerful then. Congress was still dominated mostly by older people, as was the Supreme Court and much of the media.

I could go on, but I am sure this is all in vain, as the postmodernists who make up the younger generation are mostly uninterested in the truth, and focus on ‘feelings’, whether they are left or right-wing. The boomer-bashers are making up ‘history’ to rationalize their gut-level resentment and loathing of their elders. They do not have facts on their side — but that doesn’t matter to them, apparently.

I’ve often said to those who cheer for the impending deaths of their hated elders, (as illustrated in that meme wishing elderly boomers to be at the ‘tender mercies’ of “all those diversities”) that they need only wait for the demise of the old folks they despise; boomers are already dying.

And by the way, millennials oddly idolized David Bowie, who was a counterculture boomer, as well as Alan Rickman, likewise of that age group. Illogical, huh? If I’m not mistaken, another recently deceased boomer icon was Prince, a ‘late boomer.’

Yes, boomers are dying off — most real-life boomers being decent people who lived responsible lives, worked, and brought up families, and I expect these callow critics to celebrate their passing by mockery and sneering — and cheering, like that displayed in these memes. Those memes are a testament to how unfeeling our society, once Christian, has become. They reflect a hard-heartedness and callousness that would shock our grandparents and great-grandparents. Am I really alone in this feeling?

To mock the dishonest conventions of Political Correctness is one thing;  to repudiate all the euphemisms and willful denials of racial realities is brave and heroic, even,  in our age of lies. But wishing suffering (at the hands of ”all those diversities”) on our helpless elders is not brave or heroic or admirable; it’s petty, cold-hearted, and cowardly, directed as it is at people who are ailing and weak. That sentiment is something that is ‘not very White’ of those who harbor such animus. If that sentiment is the majority feeling, maybe our folk don’t deserve to continue as a people; maybe we should capitulate to the ‘diversity’ where fellow-feeling is an aberration. Maybe we are already becoming like those who were once subject to us. They’ve assimilated us, if we’ve lost our ‘hearts of flesh.’

No, Whites were not savages who abandoned our dying elders on ice floes or in the desert, though it seems that practice suddenly appeals to some of ‘us’ in this age of decline.

(For those who are not familiar with the older idioms, it used to be a compliment to a White man to say ”that’s mighty White of you,” or ‘You’re a real White man”, meaning someone who was honorable and decent.  Maybe the idiom has died out not just because of PC but because few people merit the compliment now.)

But let’s suppose hating boomers for their coarsening of the culture is justifiable — even though most boomers were not part of that debasing process. But suppose we decide all boomers are culpable. Then by all means, repudiate them and all they stood for. Show integrity; be honest and reject all that the worst of the boomers stood for, including the ‘sexual revolution’ and the plague of obscene language and deviancy.

But that’s not going to happen. Why? Because the critics paradoxically ‘hate the sinner and love the sin.‘

And it will go on; it seems there’s no stopping this trend, not even after the last boomer is six feet under, I suspect.