Opinion

Millennials’ extreme hatred for Baby Boomers is totally unjustified

Baby boomers who cried “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” during the Vietnam War should be scared to death of millennials. Because, at least among the Twitterati, they hate us — they really, really hate us.

Last week I took a beating from younger readers over an essay I wrote lamenting the decline of the “power lunch.” Although it only partly blamed the phenomenon on millennial habits — e.g., preferring avocado and kale to beef and baked potatoes — hundreds of thousands on Twitter either posted or retweeted such insults as “Old man yells at lunch table” (I’m 69), “What’s it like to be an antique?” and “We’re the ones doing the actual lunches while you’re having three-martini lunches.”

Millennials (and to some extent their Gen-X and Gen-Z brethren) hate their elders with a ferocity never before seen in our culture. Egged on by the media-savvy likes of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, they blame prolonged heat waves on boomers who supposedly stood by and cheered as the Earth went up in flames. The phrase “OK BOOMER” has now become young people’s “repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it,” marking “the end of friendly generational relations,” The New York Times declared last week. According to the article, a teen designer has already sold $10,000 worth of sweatshirts with the “OK BOOMER” slogan repeated many times on the front, ending with the line, “Have a terrible day.”





Generation gaps will always be with us. Historian Marc Wortman found a generational split over sending young men off to war way back in 1941. But unlike those of us who came of age in the 1960s-early 1970s, who merely disapproved of our elders’ “colonialist” wars and shag rugs, millennials (born between 1980-1994) can’t stand the air we boomers breathe.

Too many millennials whine that their complacent elders bequeathed them a rotten America and a rotten world — economic malaise that will leave them with lousier lives than their parents and a planet on fire from climate change. But if they spent more time studying actual history, which can’t easily be found on iPhones, they’d know that boomers were, and remain, the most socially and environmentally conscious generation America ever has ever known. Maybe too much so — our universities’ overwhelmingly “progressive” agendas originated in the 1960s and have become more dominant ever since.





For all our deep divisions, the United States is an immeasureably more open, diverse and tolerant society than it was in the 1950s. Boomers also won the Cold War against Communist tyranny and along the way brought us unprecedented prosperity and technological innovation. The latter includes the made-in-USA digital revolution that brought forth the gadgets without which millennials couldn’t get out of bed.

While some millennials are truly committed to constructive change, many more seem to be upset mainly because they have to “work too hard.” Their lust to become CEOs at 25 without first paying their dues or even learning the business is hilariously satirized on “The Millennials,” a “Saturday Night Live” segment where a vapid young woman demands a promotion after three days on the job.





‘Millennials hate their elders with a ferocity never before seen in our culture’

Plenty of ambitious, future-focused millennials work their hearts out at taxing, low-paying jobs. But many “working” members of their generation wear their resentment on their un-ironed sleeves.

They’re out to lunch in a different way. They seem allergic to using the phone, or even waiting on customers. A stoned Starbucks clerk, after asking me to endlessly repeat my order for a grande coffee, then repeating it to himself, asked me, “What were you having?” The zoned-out guy at Duane Reade took a $5 bill from me and inexplicably asked me what my phone number was — to the amused tittering of decidedly older customers in line behind me.

There’s no question that many younger Americans face challenging economic conditions. Despite record-high employment, many new jobs are low-paying, short-term, lacking in benefits and are subject to instant termination without warning.





Student loans, which many recipients think should be forgiven, may indeed cost more than they did when I was in college.

But is it really that much more? Despite horror stories about six-figure debt, college grads owed an average $29,200 for student loans in 2018, according to the nonprofit Institute for College Access & Success. That’s barely more than the $4,000 I owed when I graduated in 1971 — which was $25,249 adjusted for inflation in 2019 dollars.

How did I pay it off? Rather than expect instant transport into the corridors of corporate power, I, like most of my friends, worked my butt off in backbreaking, sometimes dangerous jobs that offered no more guarantees or benefits than many companies confer today.

Maybe today’s young workers who resent lunching at their desks would prefer busing tables in a high-volume steakhouse under merciless, slave-driving owners, as I first did when I got out of college.

Our bosses fed us sandwiches before a 10-hour shift that included no lunch or dinner break inside or out — and for sure, no martinis.





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