My wife and I traveled to Columbus, Ohio recently to visit our daughter Abby and her family, and to attend an Ohio State football game.
After three quarters of 30-degree windy weather and a 40-point lead over Maryland, we decided enough was enough and headed home. The 110,000 seat “Shoe” is awesome and the crowd control was amazingly well-done.
Political discussions are the stuff of conversation in Abby’s home and there are no shortage of topics. I suggested that we were going through a generational power transition and the slate of Democratic hopefuls proved this.
The polls were showing that the three leading candidates were all early Baby Boomers, who were espousing progressive ideas like government-run medical care for all, or free college tuition. In the case of Joe Biden, it just seemed he was comfortable to a lot of folks. The younger candidates were all struggling to get traction.
Abby responded with the meme “OK Boomer,” which is really an Internet put-down, saying it was time for us old folks to turn over the reins of power. Even worse, we were leaving a mess of climate disasters, income inequality, massive debt for college educations, political corruption and a very dangerous uncontrolled digital world. After asking what in the world was a meme, to my amazement, my 9-year-old granddaughter Claire showed me the definition of meme on an iPhone.
This reminded me of discussions with my father who was a member of the Greatest Generation. We were watching the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention on an old-fashioned “dumb” TV, when the police were herding thousands of demonstrators down a dead end street away from the convention center. These scruffy long-haired protesters fought back because they had no place to go and were being clubbed into submission. The phrase “police-induced riot” was coined after this event. My dad thought this was well-handled and I thought it was an outrage. The generational change had begun and now it starts again.
The power of a meme is its brevity. In two simple words, “OK Boomer,” everything we fought for as young people was being dismissed. The enormous progress made by minorities and women, the technological advances upon which our lives depend, the environmental movement and so much more that the Boomers started were all for naught.
So should we respond with another meme, “whatever” or just attempt to hold on to power for one more election round?
Think about that as you head to the voting booth less than a year from now.
Roger Carlton is a columnist for The Graham Star.