The topic was the OK Boomer meme. Dear reader, I must admit up front that until I took part in this online dialogue between young people and baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), I had no idea what the OK Boomer phrase was about.
The tone of the dialogue was confused and defensive boomers talking across some weary, long-suffering Millennials and GenXers. My first tendency to try to bridge the gap, act as the translator, and smooth the troubled waters of miscommunication was soon supplanted by my dawning realization about my need to stop and truly listen.
Beyond the dismissive, world-weary, talk-to-the-hand, aspects of this meme (young people are so tired of trying to get the Boomers to see things from their point of view that they're brushing us off), I have begun to understand the profundity from which this glib-sounding phrase has sprung.
Born four years into the Baby Boom to a white, well-educated, upwardly mobile family, my future looked nothing but rosy. My innate optimism was met with affirmation through my idyllic '50's childhood in Palo Alto. Through my teenaged years we lived in suburban D.C., south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Here my childhood was rapidly chewed up and turned into an adolescence fraught with my rising consciousness peppered with racial conflict and the ever-increasing war we were waging in S.E.Asia.
While the opportunities I took to become active in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement felt important and very meaningful, I did all that I did without, yet, any sense of the enormous privilege that I had wrapped as a magic cloak around me. At Stanford I was tear-gassed and suspended for non-violent, non-destructive demonstrations against the University's direct involvement (through the Stanford Research Institute, then directly affiliated with the school) in weapons development.
I might have stuck around and pursued one academic degree after another as my older siblings had done, but I was different. I was born gay and, even in 1968, I had the good sense to know that there was nothing the matter with my love and attraction to men. I participated up in San Francisco in the first gay picket line, protesting the firing of a young man from his job simply because he was gay. And then I was living in the West Village for a semester of acting school and the Stonewall Uprising began right around the corner from my tiny flat. It looked like my life would be on the barricades for the foreseeable future.
Fifty years ago this month I dropped out of Stanford and, with a backpack and a boyfriend, got a cheap flight on Icelandic, off to the unknown. That I found where I belonged in Amsterdam is demonstrated by the fact that I stayed for 18 years. There in Holland I felt like a whole person. I could be an activist for social change on my own terms, using my own particular skills.
Now living back in California for over 30 years, most of my social work has happened through my role as educator. I've been so up-close-and-personal with the teens I've been teaching, it feels like I'd lost touch with the world that my high school students were graduating into.
Fellow Boomers, please go here with me. Try to picture the world through the eyes of a young person between 18 and 40. Where many of us were brought up under the assumption that everything would keep getting better for the coming generations, young people today are saddled with incredible student debt, are confronted with mendacity at the highest levels of their government, and see our earth plundered by greed and tipping toward irreversible ecological disaster. Instead of bright horizons and endless possibilities, younger people see their righteous parents' dreams of peace, love and happiness have been dashed by the hard realities of poverty, hunger and homelessness in our "great" nation.
We need not be ashamed of our privileges, but we must own them as such. We need to stop pontificating, telling young folks about how they should, could, would lift themselves up by their bootstraps. We need to listen with enduring humility. We know what we know, but that is just a sliver of this great, big, complicated mess of a beautiful world.
Only in joining together across the generations can we begin to repair the damage we have done. We need to harmonize, not battle it out. The illusion of duality throws dust in our eyes. Let us wash them clear together.