Beyond Boomers and Millennials

A paradoxical generalization: Generalizations are a form of social violence. They’re also boring. I guess that makes oppression boring, you may surmise? That’s not what I meant.

Some “boomers” interrupt “younger” (than boomers) people; these “boomers” tend to be patronizing, at times sucking all the air and life force out of a room.

Some “younger” (than “boomers”) people are or can be impatient with and condescending toward “older” (than millenial) people.

This parallel suggests that people of many if not all ages are potentially arrogant and ill-tempered toward each other, intergenerationally.

As a “younger” student taught an “older” student in one of “my” classes, years ago, ageism happens in multiple directions.

Climate change? That’s *your* fault! Bailouts? That’s **your** fault. Drone strikes and hawkish complicity? That’s ***your*** fault.

Deflecting blame, and its cousins, egocentrism and self-righteousness, are a great divide and conquer (by way of bait and switch) technique.

The left languishes in part because of progressives’ dogmatism, across the generations, people biting each other in self-congratulatory frenzies. It’s an implosion pattern exploited by fascists.

End of polemical rant. Nothing new here.

Back to the cat, who cares little about news feeds, and just wants some food.

[Reposted from my Facebook page.]

Published by:

Diane R. Wiener

Diane R. Wiener (she/they) is the author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022). Her poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, and Pop the Culture Pill. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. She has poetry and creative nonfiction forthcoming in eMerge. Diane has published widely on disability, pedagogy, and empowerment, among other subjects. She blogged for the Huffington Post between May 2016 and January 2018. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. Since January 2020, Diane has been the Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, housed at Syracuse University.

Leave a comment

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s