We created these monsters
I’m not sure any generation was ever so disliked; I’m not sure why. It’s not that we brought them up with constant beatings. On the contrary, we doted. Following fashionable theories about birth, we huffed and puffed and went without drugs in labour to get perfect babies, then breastfed them till they got bored, not when we were so exhausted we could barely stand. We were perfect parents, praising them as they grew up for every small achievement, never lifting a hand in anger.
The little tyrants enjoyed the prosperity our own parents never had, and neither did we when we were kids. It was a fluke point in history. We could earn enough to live on, just, and buy houses, as many of us did.
Millennials took for granted the new comforts we struggled to provide for them; we gave them the best rock music of the century, and we thought they’d be better than us because of it all. That was droll.
Baby Boomers are now more to be pitied than condemned. We’re the one group that woke people feel free to mock.
They’re woke on gender issues, race issues, human rights, their own rights, cannabis use (which we made mainstream, by the way) and kindness every which way, except toward us. It’s as if Millennials and what came after are 14-yearolds who shun us self-consciously because everything we say and do is embarrassing, while whining for money.
We’re wrinkly. Our teeth are coffee-stained. Arthritis is creeping up on us, and we forget things. The clunky cars we used to drive had parts you had to replace; now it’s us, unwieldy ancient Cortinas needing new carburettors.
Right there is one of our crimes: we’re needing the costly, underfunded health system as we disintegrate. We’re a burden on the system we funded through taxes – or conversely, we’re despised for having health insurance and using private hospitals. As if we could afford health insurance on our pensions. Hilarious.
Predictions on our future paint a vivid social catastrophe when we should do the decent thing and fall off the perch. Hence the urgency of a voluntary euthanasia law, an issue younger people won’t need to think about ever, because they’ll never get old. Vegans live for ever.
It’s interesting how our descendants have become fussy eaters, by the way: a satisfying way to annoy parents at any age.
Millennials want to take our cars away and make us ride bicycles. They’d like to take our houses too, because that’s the other main reason for detesting us.
We paid mortgage rates in double digits to hang on to them while successive governments, in the grip of mad market theories of economics, stopped building homes for people in need. We shouldn’t have. Or something.
Compulsory acquisition of our houses can’t be far off, to force us into the army camps for the aged springing up everywhere. There’ll be high fences round them, topped with razor wire, and locked gates. That’ll serve us right for buying all the investment properties they can’t afford, though I don’t know anyone who does that, and I sure as hell don’t.
It’s the sense of entitlement I enjoy: Millennials’ belief, doubtless due to demand feeding in infancy, that when they squeal they should get whatever they want. That and the ‘‘OK Boomer’’ slogan, as patronising as it’s insulting, but so woke.
We gave them that sense of entitlement; they didn’t earn it. And now we marvel. They may be our relations, but we don’t have to like them.