I love you boomers — but cheer the heck up
Matt Heath Endless carping about younger generations sticks in the craw
Ilove baby boomers. My dad, uncles, aunties, friends’ parents, my lovely mum. Jim Hickey. All great people. But as we all know some boomers are on thin ice with my generation and those younger. Even more so now the PM has announced his distant future plans to change the retirement age. Screwing all of us in favour of them — again. Which would be okay if boomers didn’t spend so much of their time slagging us off. We may love them but lots of boomers hate us in return.
On every forum that they know how to use, boomers are ripping into gen X and Y. They grumble across comments sections, talkback radio and letters to the editor. They moan through dinner chats, tutt at restaurants, niggle us on the roads, pest noise control and grump through All Black games. Worst of all they wear reef sandals, threequarter shorts with toggles and pepper the world with their pedantic complaints written in illegible cursive writing.
“Lazy” they call younger Kiwis. “Entitled” they snark to anyone who will listen. Which is odd because for the rest of New Zealand the collective noun for baby boomers is “an entitlement”. As in “there’s an entitlement of baby boomers in this country, who were given everything, sold the silverware, failed to elect governments that would save for their retirement and then pulled up the ladder”.
Not wanting to generalise here but every baby boomer talkback call ever goes like this: “If young people did what we did and spent less on luxuries, they’d have a house deposit by now. It’s all selfies, fancy clothes, big screen TVs and no sacrifices.” Which is of course amazingly unfair. Common baby boomer complaints are that younger generations are lazy and spend too much on luxuries.