Dismantling the B-Slur: How “Ok Boomer” Is A Victory For Russia

Are we honoring MLK’s dream?

A Generation of Leaders:

“The Discourse,” a mythical amalgamation of all internet comments, workplace-kitchen hot takes, and public restroom anarchist iconography, has been poisoned by insidious, bad-faith attacks on the last brave bootstrappers: the Baby Boomers. Today, entitled Millennials sit aloft in their ivory 1-bedroom + kitchenette combos hurling senseless verbal violence at the generation that gave them the promise of a degree and the economic prospects of modern technocratic serfdom.

Born into a 20th-century Era of Good Feelings, Baby Boomers benefited from a defined sense of purpose. They understood they existed in an ideological struggle between good and evil: labor-centric, socially-democratic, union-strengthening and wage-inflating capitalism versus whatever the Soviet Union was doing — I don’t know, I never really read the textbook. Baby Boomers held onto that sense of national unity where regardless of color or creed, you were a part of the American vision in which everyone deserves an equal opportunity at happiness and prosperity unless you happened to be too uppity or too queer.

Baby Boomers knew the importance of settling down to start a 2-car-having, non-miscegenating nuclear family in a pleasant, suburban home. They knew the importance of making sure half your mortgage is paid off by wage-growth inflation from the prevalence of accessible union jobs. Then, when that system imploded because the inflation that ate the cost of their mortgages undermined investment in new capital, they had the good sense to ensure that no average American should ever be subjected to the tragedies of home ownership or debt relief. They knew these sorts of reforms simply wouldn’t be fair to anyone who came before them — anyone who scraped and saved making $50/hr at a meat-packing factory for that quintessential, “monogrammed towels to exploitative S-Corp owner” American Dream once articulated by Horatio Alger.

Breaking Point:

Today we face a crisis. Millennials, too thankless to appreciate the sense of purpose granted by the low, low price of iPhones and too reckless to save hundreds of thousands of dollars by cutting back on avocado toast brunches, turn instead to the sinister allure of universal healthcare, minimum wage increases, and social services that threaten to undermine the freedom of every temporarily-embarrassed billionaire in America (the greatest country in the entire universe). They disrespect the veterans who gave their lives to ensure that nations like Vietnam and Venezuela are too piss-poor to pose a threat to capitalist hegemony, and they have the audacity to complain endlessly about “the historical exclusion of minority groups from the fruits of domestic economic development” and “unequal treatment in the criminal justice system,” to name just two of these seemingly-endless snowflakeries.

These attempts at meliorating a system that is working just fine for an entrenched ruling class is awfully reminiscent of the Red Menace that Baby Boomers fought so tirelessly to be a unified vanguard party against. Now, Putin’s vision of a more covert sequel to the Cold War is being realized — he has turned the Baby Boomers’ own posterity against them, forever tarnishing the discourse and inching America ever-closer to the perils of tuition-free higher education.

(Content Warning: Ageist Slurs)

A New Abnormal:

Baby Boomers, historic champions of equality, now face rampant discrimination in the public sphere. Simply for harboring a difference of opinions on the civil liberties granted to transpeople and pushing back on the potentially disastrous marginal tax increases proposed by younger generations decrying the current system of economic organization as “extractive and crushing,” they’re being subjected to the disgusting and unprecedented weaponization of slurs. The newest episode in this ongoing inquisition is “Ok Boomer,” a slur designed to discredit the validity of opinions held by the Baby Boomer generation.

We see it infecting every corner of the discourse. Wherever a Baby Boomer is politely recommending that new college graduates stop buying Starbucks coffee, “Ok Boomer” is there to silence and discredit them. Whenever a Baby Boomer asserts that “there are only two genders” in the comment section of a 45-minute Contrapoints video essay or delivers a gut-busting attack helicopter quip, “Ok Boomer” is there to trample on their free speech. The plague continues to spread unvaccinated against, and Moscow continues to benefit.

To save democracy, we must first save the Baby Boomers. In his seminal work, Letter From The Birmingham Jail, the late Martin Luther King Jr. said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and it’s time we lived up to that legacy.