#kit being the 'you just made that up' twitter meme i SNORTED

[kittanthalos]

#not a single braincell in sight

[9or10allgood]

I love Tumblr.  Far more than Facebook, which has become a seething morass of political partisanship, and while I’m all about seething partisanship when it’s discussed by people willing to engage their intellects, I’m less so when “debate” means posting memes and gifs which are, let’s be honest, the electronic equivalent of saying “nanny nanny boo boo”.

Anyway… Tumblr.  You can, to some degree, control your content.  If you are, like I am, mildly (*snort*) obsessed with a certain tall, lanky, Scottish actor, you can find like-minded individuals and follow them and bask in his glory to your heart’s content.  Likewise, you can follow fandoms based on television shows and movies and plays and music… and you get my point.  You’re all here so, of course, you do.

And, if you are interested in things like politics or social issues or the environment or science or all of the above (and more), that content is also readily available on Tumblr.

Generally speaking, I find the folks on Tumblr to be considerably more relaxed and open and accepting than on Facebook.  I attribute that, for the most part, to the members being mostly younger.  I’m a great believer in young people.  The future belongs to them and I am, present circumstances notwithstanding, mostly optimistic about the future. 

I’m a Boomer.  I was born eleven years after the end of WWII. (Good Lord, I feel old!)  There were no twenty-four-hour television or radio stations, and the internet wasn’t even conceived of, even by the most forward thinkers. Doctors still made housecalls as a matter of course.  Milk was still delivered to your door every morning.   The polio vaccine was still being tested.  Putting a man on the moon was a science fiction fantasy.  

As a generation, we “Boomers” were guilty of a lot of things, beginning with not quickly enough shedding some of the baggage from the generation before us. We were still largely segregated and we are paying the price still and we will until - I don’t know how long and that disturbs me more than I can say.  We were too quick to distrust the other - just ask the immigrants that came to these shores during and after the War.  There was a dear older lady in my church when I was in high school.  A kinder, more charitable, more joyful woman you could never hope to meet.  She was a German war bride - met an American soldier and they fell in love and married and he brought her home to his small, south Georgia hometown.  Their first decade was tough - folks were slow to forget and she was sometimes ostracized.  Even when I knew her, people would sometimes refer to her (in lowered tones) as Leroy’s German frau.  

We were abysmal when it came to the environment.  I mean, look at the cars we drove in the sixties and seventies before the oil crisis forced a turn toward economy cars.  Gasoline was $.37 a gallon - and that was hi-test!  What did it matter that my mother’s 1971 Mercury Grand Marquis land yacht only got 11 miles to the gallon?  Gender equality?  Seriously?  Gender Identity?!?!?  How you came out of the womb is what you were.  Period.  And if your family had that special uncle or the aunt with a Very Close Friend, well, it just wasn’t talked about, was it…

On the other hand, there were things we did do.   That social conscience that drives our society today?  You can thank those who loudly and visibly protested the Vietnam War for a lot of it.  Sure, there were anti-war movements always, but the Vietnam War lit a fire that, with the availability of news cameras and microphones and news cycles, burned hot and bright until the last helicopter departed the US Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975.  And when the war was over, there were plenty of other things to get riled up about:  the environment, women’s rights, the right to choose, civil rights, gay rights.  Anger over things that are wrong today didn’t just start in the 2000s.  A lot of us - and I mean a lot!  - have been pissed off for a while.

Putting a man on the moon belongs to the generation before the Boomers, obviously, but the drive to continue space exploration - the space shuttle, the probes that are still sailing toward places beyond our solar system, the International Space Station, the Hubble telescope - belong to us.  Medical advances?  Advances in diabetic screening and treatment, the MRI, treatment of HIV/AIDS… Cancer research was largely theoretical until the ‘70s.  The idea of DNA re-sequencing as a therapeutic treatment?  Late ‘70’s.

And as for culture?  My generation embraced the idea of embracing the accoutrements of other cultures.  Clothing, jewelry, hairstyles, music, food… we were all about it.  I see people commenting on “cultural appropriation” as if it’s a bad thing.  We - my generation - considered it to be a tangible form of acceptance.  

(As an aside, I have a dear friend who is battling uterine cancer.  She has lost all of her hair due to chemotherapy.  On one of her “good days”, she and her family took in an Indian (the country) festival and, while she was there, saw an artist creating henna tattoos.  On impulse, she asked the woman to create one for her scalp.  It was a masterpiece, absolutely glorious, and it gave my friend so much of her joy back.  For the first time, she was proud to show herself without a wig or scarf.  I think if I’d heard anyone say anything about “cultural appropriation”, I would have punched them in the mouth.)

My point to this ramble is this.  Lately, I’ve been seeing anti-Boomer things on Tumblr.  Boomers are rude.  Boomers are backward.  Boomers are outdated.  And while I get that it’s just a thing for generations to complain about each other, it’s the absolutism that I see that bothers me.  When I was young and dealing with my parents’ generation, I didn’t consign the whole kit and kaboodle to the Dark Ages.  And, from my viewpoint as an older person, I don’t heave a great sigh and clutch my pearls over the entirety of the Gen X'ers, the Millennials (raised one!), or the Gen Z'ers.  I may get annoyed with one or two individuals and have a sudden urge to shake my cane and yell “get off my lawn, whippersnapper!” but I manage to contain myself.  (There was the young man in the electronics department at WalMart who, in his most condescending manner, asked me if I knew what a USB port was.   I wanted to tell him that I’d been working with computers since before his father first bought his mother a malt at the chocolate shoppe.  Instead, I just gave him The Look™ and he mumbled an apology.)

Absolutism about anything is corrosive.  I mean, think about it.  It lies at the heart of so many of the evils that are tearing at us now.  It feeds the desire to hate all of the “other” because of a crime perpetrated by one or a few.  Wars result from this kind of thinking.  Down through history, you see it.  And it’s so much more easily spread now with social media.  Again, I would abandon FB altogether - except that it’s how I keep up with the folks back home - because it’s become a political, partisan, largely unintelligent cesspool.  All because those on the Left believe that those on the Right are the Minions of Satan and those on the Right think that those on the Left are Bloodsucking Snowflakes.  And, of course, they don’t all think that, but it’s so easy to click a “Like” or a “Share” without really thinking about the message they are sending, and before you know it things are out of control and we’ve put a dictator wannabe in the bloody Oval Office!

(Sorry.  I’m still upset.)

There are those who ask why boomers are offended.  I mean, “ok boomer” is just a joke, right?  Well, yeah, but that same reasoning has been applied to how many derogatory labels.   (I read one comment that “Boomer” isn’t an ageist slur. Except it kinda is, y'know?)  And, again, it spreads and it gets blown out of proportion and there are those who are just ready to jump on a bandwagon - any bandwagon! - and the next thing you know, it’s trending on Twitter and we’ve got one more thing to get mad about that shouldn’t be anything at all because there are so many other things that we really should be mad about and trying to do something about…

Do you get my point?  

If someone of any generation gets on your last good nerve, by all means, express yourself.  (Short of violence, obviously.)  But ease up on projecting the “they’re all bad" mentality.  It isn’t true.  It doesn’t make anything easier.  And we’re all better than that.

Aren’t we?