"OK Boomer" Retort

dfbdfb
Wed, 13 Nov 2019 03:59:41 +0000

So this all has gotten me thinking back to a conversation I had with some college classmates I didn’t really know well as we were waiting for class to begin. (The Structure of English, for those of you keeping score at home.)

We were talking about all the ways that our parents and grandparents would occasionally say or do sexist or racist stuff that we found horrifying, and one of the group said that it’s good we were less sexist et cetera than previous generations, but we’d probably end up being just as horrifying to our kids and grandkids as our parents and grandparents were to us.

And another of the group then said that maybe that was the point—the objective isn’t to reach perfection in a single bound, but to try to raise the next generation so that they would be scandalized by us, because that would mean we’d raised them to be a little bit better than we were, and thus we would have improved the world.

The more I’ve thought about it since then, the more I think she was right.

So maybe cut the Millennials and the Zoomers a little slack, and recognize that all of us olds really are deserving of their scorn, because we’ve raised them to be horrified by us, and in so doing we’ve improved the world—which is a good thing!