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Ok, boomer. ” The expression has become popular in social networks as the way in which young people despise the children of the baby boom , those born in the fifties and first sixties of the twentieth century, so that they cease to sermonize them. Last November, the phrase (or meme) was heard in the New Zealand Parliament, and was pronounced by a 25-year-old deputy, Chlöe Swarbrick, against another parliamentarian who interrupted her. Then he had to apologize, because labeling people by their age is still ugly discrimination (they call it age ).
Let's relativize that wordsearch of the generations. Today the marketing machinery indicates one almost every decade (the X, the millennials, the Z, the alpha), when in strict terms the distance between one and the other should be that between children and parents, which does not fall below 30 years.
I don't know if I'm a boomer : in Spain the peak of birth rate was later than in the rest of the West. I know that those born in the sixties have lived in the front row of the technological revolution, we have climbed all the waves and we have the perspective to understand it. The baby boom generation managed the first computers (the mythical Spectrum), the first consoles (they were already from Nintendo), was the first to connect to the Network (with that modem that was beating). He came to the mobile as an adult but launched for the smartphone as soon as it appeared in the store. Boomers like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos led us here.
My fifth is as hooked on connected life as any later. We are not digital natives, not that. Those who have touched touch screens since babies have other habits. Studies say they are less vicious and are related in other ways, although they point to worse reading habits. It has also been said that the problem of the alpha generation is that their millennial parents, pending mobile, pay less attention to them.
Nothing new under the sun. Since ancient times adults have looked strangely at young people, and these have turned against their elders. But there are specific reasons for generational rancor to be resolved today. Young people accuse their elders of having left them a precarious ( uberized ) labor market and unaffordable housing ( air-conditioned ?). Greta Thunberg's contemporaries are the most sensitive to the climate crisis: they know they will suffer its effects. And, since boomers are the wide floor of the population pyramid, those who enter employment fear that the pensions of those who retire are a great burden.
It is inevitable to give way to those who come behind. Our moment will pass, and that of the following too, and so on. It is the law of life. But it is unfair to caricature out of wave boomers , as if they were ignorant of the world they created. For better or worse.
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