Those Good Old Days

Not too very long ago I wrote something here on the old bloggerino about people needing to be more civil and kind on Facebook. It’s that whole thing of people being really brave when they don’t have to look a person in the eye.

Well, today I got into a little bit of a brou-ha-ha and could have used my own advice. But it was a good reminder of how easy things can go south in a simple conversation.

A Facebook friend of mine (all names will be withheld) posted something about baby boomers…as I recall it was a tweet saying people shouldn’t attack baby boomers because they’re old and struggling, followed by a snarky (but totally fair) reply. So I commented (and I’m shortening it quite a bit) that I didn’t understand why people lump baby boomers into a category of evil, racism, etc. The year you were born has nothing to do with your behavior, your opinions, the way you interact with people older or younger than you, etc. Labels suck. It sucks when older people say mean or inaccurate things about “millennials”. (I do that to Kalin but it’s in a joking way, just as he calls me a “dehydrated old bastard” in a joking way.) But it also sucks when younger people say mean or inaccurate things about “baby boomers.”

This is when FOF (friend of my friend) jumped in and said, “Don’t say boomer shit and you won’t have any trouble.” To which I replied, “What exactly is ‘boomer shit’? ‘Darn these kids and their smartphones?’ ‘Get a job and a haircut?’ ‘I remember the good old days of Elvis and malt shops’?”

This was my first mistake. I gave examples that I thought were oversimplified, more in an effort to be funny than anything else. Humor never registers in print to a stranger. It might register face-to-face with a stranger, or in print to a friend. But never in print to a stranger.

See, here’s the thing. I’ve heard about people being upset with the things some people of my parents’ generation say. But I genuinely wanted a better idea of what exactly is being said that upsets people so. Well, FOF (friend of my friend–keep up!) informed me that all three of my examples were “boomer shit.”

“Even the Elvis and malt shop one? That seems kind of anodyne,” I replied. (Anodyne is a great “Know your word power” word.)

FOF replied that Elvis sucks, and people’s warm memories of the 1950s were tainted and awful because of the way people of color were treated back then.

This threw me for quite the loop. But I didn’t have much time to think about it, because he went on to say that people who get nostalgic or enjoy the music and other things of their youth tend to be toxic. He also threw in a delightful bon mot about how he listens only to new music and believes he will continue that habit until he dies.

You might be fair in guessing at this point that FOF and I won’t be pen pals.

There was more to this little Facebook skirmish…but these are the primary points. After he declared that people who enjoy older things are “impotent” I got a little snarky.with him. FOF accused me of “twisting his words” and deemed me “toxic”. I flew the white flag of surrender and apologized for anything I’d said to upset him and essentially apologized for the whole exhausting conversation.

So why I am writing a blog about this? Well, because (here come some naughty words) FOF pissed me right the fuck off and put a black cloud over at least an hour of my day. And I feel stupid about that. But I do want to make a couple of points.

Number one: I am a complete retro doofus, and will never feel guilty or regretful about that. I love Perry Como music, “Gilligan’s Island”, The Beatles, Alfred Hitchcock movies, Archie comic books and lots of other old stuff. And if at any time in my life I have been “toxic” it has everything to do with my mental state or lack of maturity, and nothing to do with my love of “Petticoat Junction” reruns.

Number two: At every single point in history at least some of the people have been treated poorly. Name a year. Some classification of human being was not given the freedoms they deserved. Women, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, LGBTQ, etc. No matter when you grew up, some classification of people were getting the shaft. So either this means that nobody can ever have warm and fuzzy feelings for their youth, or everybody can while still accepting that they grew up in an imperfect world.

Put this another way, for the benefit of FOF and those who think similarly: If baby boomers can’t have warm feelings about drive-in movies and sock hops because racism against African-Americans was rampant, then people who grew up in the 1980s can’t enjoy 8-bit video games and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” because equally horrid and systemic discrimination of another sort was happening.

Or, again…everybody can enjoy these things while admitting, and understanding, that they grew up in an imperfect world.