Shifting Blame

[unspeakablehorror]

Part of what bothers me about blaming Boomers for everything that's wrong in the world is that it allows younger people an artificial separation from their culpability in the problems our world faces.  No matter what age a nazi is, they're a problem.  No matter what age a white person is, they benefit from racism and practice it, whether consciously or unconsciously so (though that doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't try to do better).  No matter what age a man is, he still lives in and benefits from a patriarchal system that privileges him over women.  No matter what age a straight or cis person is, they still live in and benefit from a system that privileges them over LGBT people.  I refuse to absolve the younger generation from their responsibility for these issues, and even a cursory understanding of history tells me that Boomers didn't create any of these problems. 

I think this is why the whole "Okay, Boomer" thing has gained such popularity, because it allows younger white people, younger men, younger straight and cis people to feel like they're not part of the problem, when in fact a younger white person can be just as racist to an older black person, a younger man can be just as misogynist to an older woman (and let's not forget how ageism is particularly hard on women), and a younger cis or straight person can be just as transphobic or homophobic to older cis or straight people.

There's a certain irony to the whole thing too, since there was eg. much more in the way of antiwar demonstrations when Boomers were growing up than there is now and in certain ways the current prevailing culture is more conservative.  The other ironic thing is that quite a few of them were also pretty ageist when they were younger with the whole "don't trust anyone over 30" thing so in some respects the "ok, Boomer" thing is just a revival of that Boomer-era slogan in different clothes.  I wonder what the Gen Z equivalent will be?  Every generation believes it is somehow inherently better than the one before it.

But I don't think Gen X and Millennials accomplish anything worthwhile by blaming the world's problems on Boomers.  All they do is obscure their own culpability in those problems and make themselves feel better at the expense of older people of color, older women, older trans and lgbt people, and older activists, some of who literally died for what they believed in, and some of whom are still fighting for those beliefs today.  All they do is lump in all those older people with their oppressors, while implicitly absolving their younger oppressors of responsibility. 

Comments

[chamerion]

Yeah, this drives me nuts too. It's every bit as silly as the handwringing by some older people about millennials, much as the folks engaging in it would hate the comparison. In fact I can never really picture this stuff as anything but two kindergarteners on a playground slinging very childish insults and then responding "No, you!"

As you say, I think a lot of the appeal is the (perhaps subconscious) shifting of responsibility. That, and human beings just generally being far too enamored with neat and clean ways of categorizing people. It's not always popular to say but I think you see a pretty similar dynamic in the way folks often ignore class in discussions about privilege. It's pretty easy for, say, a wealthy LBGTQ person to mentally categorize rural poor people as oppressors, and then speak about them with very little self-awareness for the ways they themselves are punching down. Which doesn't mean that poor rural communities aren't often rife with homophobia (or racism) - they are! But things get ugly fast when what ought to be criticism of homophobia or racism is expressed as classist contempt instead.

[unspeakablehorror]

Yeah, I was thinking that about the similarity to those people who write those ridiculous Millennial thinkpieces, too. Though in general I think those people tend to be both privileged and comfortable openly espousing conservative ideology in a way I don't think a lot of the 'ok, boomer' crowd is, I just think that the 'blame boomers for all our problems' crowd just feel more comfortable not examining the real reasons for oppression and the climate crisis since that can implicate them in ways that picking a generation to foist all the blame on won't. But acting like every boomer is the kind of person who eats those kinds of thinkpieces up is to me the same categorical error as deciding that journalists all have that kind of attitude since some subset of journalists are responsible for those kinds of thinkpieces.

People blaming boomers for everything is a bit reminiscent to me of garden variety misanthropy where people decide that literally everyone is responsible for the evils in the world so they blame the oppressor and oppressed equally. It's a microcosm of that attitude, I feel.

And yeah, rich people scapegoating the poor is truly unsavory.

[chamerion]

“Acting like every boomer is the kind of person who eats those kinds of thinkpieces up is to me the same categorical error as deciding that journalists all have that kind of attitude since some subset of journalists are responsible for those kinds of thinkpieces” - exactly.

Rich people scapegoating poor people is unsavory for sure but that’s not even necessarily the point that I’m making. It’s that a lot of folks want to be able to sort people into tidy boxes, which is not always easy to do when you’re talking about (for example) a rich woman with some ugly classist beliefs and a poor man with some ugly misogynist views. Each of those people both benefits and suffers from oppression in some way. But instead of confronting those complexities people often try to break everything down to one simple oppressor/oppressed binary (often by ignoring class and classism entirely). I think the whole boomer vs. millennial thing is partly driven by that human impulse toward very reductive thinking. It’s too complicated to deal with the idea that there are rabid old Fox News watchers and young climate activists but also 30-year-old fascist thugs and 80yos who marched for civil rights and everything in between in infinite variety, poor and rich and gay and straight and black and white and disabled and abled etc. Instead of confronting that people create these caricatures - the boomer as wealthy white straight man, the millennial as poor lgbtq person of color - and talk about them like they’re meaningful categories rather than transparent oversimplifications. Probably because it allows them to feel like they're not part of the problem, as you say, but also because they just don't like dealing with complexities.

[unspeakablehorror]

That's a good point and I agree that it's probably a big reason why people do things like categorize boomers or people who live in rural areas as oppressors. From a more theoretical standpoint neither of those groups is inherently an oppressor class but we also don't live in a simple world where someone either is in an oppressor group or isn't but rather one where it's quite possible to be both because people are multidimensional. There are also some people who understand that part but then think that the more of those boxes they can check as an individual the more oppressed they are (and the more oppressed they are, the more right/morally superior they are compared to other people), but being oppressed also doesn't automatically make people right or better people.