'OK, boomer' not an insult, it's a badge of honor Mary McNamara Los Angeles Times (TNS) You OK, boomer? After all those anti-establishment placards and slogans, the years of controlling the vernacular and riding herd on the culture, it’s tough to be reduced to a catchphrase. Sent your way, you might add, by people “discovering” corduroy hip huggers and bong collections. I mean, you made youth culture a thing, your thing, and now look what’s happened. You, mercifully, did not die before you got old, which means you got old. And despite your insistence that 70 is the new 30, 30 is not the new 10 and 20-year-olds still exist. Which means that, on top of all the knee problems and hip problems and weed getting legalized with no one thanking you for it even though you basically invented weed, you have to deal with a bunch of whippersnappers throwing “OK, boomer” shade on sweatshirts and TikTok. Not that you’re 100% sure what TikTok is and why can’t everyone just stay on Twitter and Facebook? You at least understand Twitter and Facebook. That’s probably where you read about the conservative radio host saying “boomer” was the age equivalent of the “nword” (which, well, words fail me) and that’s where you went to express your own outrage over getting dissed by a bunch
of kids who never had to walk nine miles through snow just to protest the Vietnam War. In fact, you probably had no idea the phrase “OK, boomer” was being slung around in memes and gifs on various platforms that are not Twitter
TikTok generation tick.” I am not sure there is such a thing as a “TikTok generation,” though it definitely sounds like the most fun generation ever. And it’s certainly a better name than, say, “extreme weather caused by global warming”
and Facebook until the New York Times wrote about it. And frankly, being unaware of the happenings among young people until the New York Times writes about it is possibly The Most Boomer Thing Ever. Even for those who work at the Times — a few days later Maureen Dowd wrote about getting “OK boomered” by “the 27-year-old in my office” to whom she has turned to for help in deciphering “what makes the
generation. But I am not convinced there is any generation, in the shared experience/personality sense; the baby boom was named, as you will note, for its size. The collective narrative of protest and upheaval followed by rank consumerism and self-satisfaction that the term has come to denote is most certainly not shared by every person born within those years. Technically, I am a boomer,
born at the tail end of the 1946-1964 definition, but I do not identify as one (such a Gen Z term, right?). I got shoulder pads and yuppies rather than love beads and hippies. Air Supply instead of Jefferson Airplane, “St. Elmo’s Fire” rather than “Easy Rider.” Indeed, the most enduring legacy of the boomers, also known for a while as the me generation, may be the notion of generational identification. Hilariously, the generation that preceded, and indeed produced, the boom is known as the silent generation. “Gen X” is the moniker that stuck to the generation following the boom, and what on earth does that mean? Nothing except not a boomer. Which is pretty much the whole point of “OK, boomer”: That all this generational identification is, at best, nonsense and, at worst, an attempt by certain members of the baby boom generation to continue to define everyone else in relationship to themselves. Or how they define themselves — when a child I know dressed as a hippie for Halloween, a man at one house she visited remarked, “Oh, you’re dressed as a future Republican.” So, obviously, feelings still run high. Still, it must be hard when, having belonged to a group that was identified as revolutionary, influential and cool, you are dismissed by folks you consid-
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