I guess the new thing with the young’uns when confronted with challenges from their elders is to reply with the inane dismissive of “OK Boomer” – or the newest pejorative variant “GFYS Boomer” (these crazy kids and their acronyms).

Of course, the implication is that now that you old folks have stolen Greta Thunberg’s childhood, you just need to sit down and shut the f*ck up because we got this – our world is new, shiny, so switched on and woke up that you just don’t get it. Your world is over, your old-fashioned ideas of religion, capitalism, liberty, duty, responsibility and social order (that allows us the freedom to talk to you like this) are over. Just get out of our faces, crawl away and die as we create our majestic brave new world with our brave new ideas (which have all been tried and failed).

Seems a little short sighted to me for a generation that can be stopped dead by a power outage to claim any sort of superiority over a generations who decidedly persevered in an age of low technologies like books, face to face conversations, actually having to go out in public to meet people, building physical things to make a living and inventing the foundation for world the young’uns now enjoy.

Seems ridiculous for a generation that exists on contradiction to assert any sort of superiority. For example:

• They want to ban capitalism that produced the very technologies upon which they depend for communication and information.
• They want to ban the sources of energy that powers their computers, phones and the server farms that drive them and replace them with systems that can’t provide enough to satisfy their demands.
• They demand that we fight climate change in such an ineffective manner that if realized, would devolve industry and society back to a time when environmental damage was arguably greater than it is today.
• They want socialism but assume that nothing in their own lives would change – that such a change would only impact “others” – without understanding that everybody is someone else’s “other”. The need to ask the people in Hong Kong about how that works.
• They want to replace a system of societal order and morality that they think is antiquated and too strict with their own systems of situational ethics and faddish contrivances. What’s right today is wrong tomorrow if they feel like changing things. That’s not evolution, it’s chaos.

“OK, Boomer” and the presumptive, self-righteous, vacuous basis behind it is actually the perfect description of the many presumptive, self-righteous, vacuous members of that generation.

This may sound like a “Get off my lawn!” moment, but sometimes such a response is warranted. This is one of those times.