Ammo Grrrll has drafted 10 resolutions for subsequent generations in OK, BOOMER! Or, REVENGE OF THE GENS. She writes:
As we should always remember, we stand on the shoulders of giants — not merely the courageous and self-sacrificing geniuses who created the American Republic and brought it to fruition, but subsequent generations, all of which except the Baby Boomers were named in retrospect.
There probably are few quibbles about whether The Greatest Generation deserves that appellation. Born from 1901 to 1927 (my own parents on the far edge of it, born in 1921 and 1925), they lived through the Great Depression and won World War II, and THEIR parents lived through the horrors of World War 1.
I always felt a little sorry for the so-called Silent Generation (1928-1945), as that struck me as a bit dismissive of people who had no choice when they were born, grew up, went to work every day – nose to the grindstone, not making a big fuss — and raised kids, paid their taxes, just like previous generations. If they WERE “silent” maybe they were collectively traumatized to near-catatonia by being small kids during the Depression and then watching the world descend into the madness of The Holocaust and another World War.
Joe/Max and I are in the Advanced Guard of the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and nobody in his right mind would ever have thought of calling our generation “Silent.” More’s the pity!
In many ways, our values and mores are much closer to our parents’ generation than what followed. We were taught thrift, honesty, monogamy, belief in and worship of God – all the values tossed into the dustbin of history by leading spokes-morons of our and subsequent generations. I nevertheless do believe that “the fundamental things apply as Time goes by” to the majority of people. They just don’t have access to the big megaphones.
We can see that now with a return to Common Sense and cultural issues reverting to the sensible 80/20 breakdown we should expect outside of a lunatic asylum. No, women do not have a penis; no, killing a full-term baby because you CAN is not health care. No, a five-foot tall, 110-lb woman cannot compete in football, boxing, soccer, swimming, tennis or rugby with a 250-lb, 6’7” man. No, a “mother” is not a chest-feeding birthing person!
But the advanced guard of our Boomer Generation is a stone’s throw from our 80s. Subsequent generations are sick of us and have conspired to make our remaining years difficult — especially for the techno-resistant among us, which definitely includes your intrepid columnist. If I did not have Joe/Max, I doubt I would even have email, let alone anything more complicated. I take good care of him, feed him, and see that there is at least a narrow pathway into his mancave if he goes in sideways. So it’s a fair trade.
I fantasize – soon to be a major Conspiracy Theory by the MAGA people – that all subsequent generations have gotten together in a convention and passed the following resolutions:
1. Since the Boomers seem to have accumulated all the cash, be it resolved that their cash money will be no good anywhere. Heretofore, you will not be able to go to a concert or ballgame and pay for anything with your stupid money. Want to buy a beer at a ballgame where somebody younger got you in? Ha! Guess again.
2. Be it resolved that you must take your phone in a restaurant and find one of a few hundred apps and swipe the phone across this stupid square thing here. You say you don’t have your phone WITH you? Haha, good one. NOBODY “doesn’t have their phone” with him. Really? You can’t be SERIOUS! What do you do in a restaurant? Talk? Eat? Well, sorry, you can’t even SEE a menu without that and you can’t pay with your disgusting cash. (Side note: we tried to order a pizza to be delivered to a hotel room in Edmond, OK, which we had done in years past before the Stick-It-To-The-Boomers Convention, and it could not be done without signing up for yet another bleeping “APP” and giving them more information than we did to get a mortgage.)
3. No, you cannot call to make a reservation at either a hotel or a restaurant, because nobody will answer. That entry-level position has been eliminated. Just make it online, Boomer. Just trust that it will be there when you arrive, exhausted.
4. You will never have a casual conversation with a pleasant stranger again. You will remember fondly how you once met a great friend in line at the bank in San Francisco. Now you will talk to nobody ever because they will be on their phone only you won’t be able to see it because they will be wearing “human contact-canceling” headphones. They will shrink in fear if you accidentally interrupt their viewing pictures of the sandwich their sister has ordered in the restaurant she booked online.
5. You will not be able to open any food without drawing blood. Razor sharp plastic that has to be manipulated by your arthritic little Boomer hands will prevent you from getting to that sweet cantaloupe. Put down the butcher knife – nothing good will ever come of that! When you think you will outflank us by using that little red rubber thing to open the milk with great difficulty, there will be a slick foil cover with no visible tab that you have to pull off with your weak little liver-spotted hands.
6. You will have to fill out forms that actually ask you your pronouns, even though they are totally obvious to anyone but a mentally-ill ideologue.
7. Be it resolved that you will have to learn all kinds of strange and threatening words like phishing, smishing, quishing. There will be dozens of shapeshifting ways to get your money, from outright theft at gunpoint at the ATM machine to calling you pretending to be your grandson stuck in a jail in Canada who needs money wired for bail.
8. Be it resolved that there will be consequences for retaining the values you were raised with. If you are a kind Christian, a Nigerian “Christian” will address you as a “Brother in Christ” as he tries to convince you that if you just tell him your bank account number, he will be able to get his own personal fortune out of Nigeria and he will give you a big reward.
9. And finally, be it resolved that you Boomers’ superior way with words – gained through a theme a week in English Class back in the silly Literate Age — will be nullified because AI will be able to write anything better than you can. Oh, sure, CURRENTLY it sometimes makes hilarious “guesses” as to what letter or word comes next but those little glitches will be fixed eventually and there will never be an original thought again. (Just a couple weeks ago in a text, a friend asked “what is the name of that medicine you got for athlete’s foot?” and one of the options my phone gave as a response was “What do you WANT it to be?”)
10. Also, Boomers, please know that we have mad skills and can put out images of you doing a Nazi salute or put naked pictures of you on the Internet to make you want to kill yourself. Or at least to make teenage girls so harassed want to kill themselves.
But here is MY alternative idea: There is an activist model named Emily Ratajkowski. She is very rarely photographed with clothing ON. Neither would I be if my body looked like that. She often goes naked to protest something and may actually believe that looking at her naked will draw people to the cause. They will see Emily in her birthday suit and say, “If she feels this deeply about wearing fur, surely I will never wear a mink coat again! Even if I had one.”
Anyway, please, please, Boomer-haters, I am begging you – feel free to use her body and my head and put those pictures out there far and wide. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
