By Colby Malsbury

(Author’s note: the following article does not represent individual Boomers or Millennials who are committed Christians – both of whom I count as valuable kith and kin.)

Hey kids!

Did you know that baby boomers are a generation of grubby parasites who had the world handed to them on a silver platter to such an extent that they finagled economic booms and busts to their credit all their working lives, allowing them to take a very early and very cushy retirement, allowing them ample opportunity to globe-hop the world picking up exotic mail order brides and bemoaning the fact that younger folks weren’t picking up extra shifts down at the Apple factory or wherever they’re working these days in order to keep the Social Security gravy train on the rails in perpetuity?

And did you also know that Millennials are the most indolent and disrespectful generation that ever walked God’s green earth, too busy putting charcoal on cereal and gluing their nose to their iDevices all the live long day, refusing to buy houses and Beemers, earning Ivy League university degrees in Turds, and driving the price of Tide Pods up to astronomical levels because they’ve decided that they’re a tasty snack?

And, furthermore, did you know that both of these innate states of reality matter one blue whit as the post-Christian West approaches cataclysm?

Well, there ye be. Three new things you learned today. Good night, sweet friends!

In a previous article, I expounded upon the controlled nature of the Twitter platform, and how the discourse is subtly but forcibly moderated into a Delphi method parameter. It would appear that I must expand upon this categorization and apply it to the rest of social media as well. Facebook has become a veritable pressure cooker these days with the palpable tension that steadily escalates with each typing of that magical two-worded talisman ‘ok boomer’. The catchphrase’s elevation to the pantheon of Meme is undeniable. Facebook pages dedicated to this interesting concessionary statement are legion, running the gamut from the simple yet ingenious Cropped Boomer Memes to the more boomer-as-cosplay-character oriented Garden Hoses & the Olden Days, and every style and frequency of satire in between these two examples of the form. The justifiable anger of Millennials (and, increasingly, Gen-Zers) over their corporate dispossession has thus turned upon the eldest generation likely to be using the internet in any very substantial numbers. Just as misguided revolutionary ardor very quickly deranges discernment between friends and foes, though, so too has this young wrath been visited upon an incorrectly identified hoary head – from Greatest generation-era Clint Eastwood on the upper end of the scale, to guys ten years younger than me (a humble Gen-Xer) on the lower. This might reflect understandable frustration, but does not point to any very profound ideological schism.

For their part, boomers have done remarkably little to combat this cyber-grassfire. Their part in the bloodletting has been to repeat the mantra of boomer solutions for boomer problems in the boomer world that they largely thrived in (‘legal immigration!’ ‘buy a house!’ ‘take multiple copies of your resume with you whenever you go out!’), to post self-aggrandizing selfies of themselves and their brand new gold-digging young Oriental brides (often with their phones clearly reflected in their ubiquitous sunglasses), and proffering general threats of disinheritance and tactfully pointing out that they still have all the money, and he who has the gold makes the rules. So yeah, you can safely say that I find the Millennials’ ‘How dare you!!!’ and the Boomers’ ‘Ha, ha, I got mine!!!’ attitudes equally odious.

Tiresome as this mutual caterwauling has become, it becomes much worse when one considers that it is a mere morph of the Trump/Never-Trump imbroglio, which in its third year of continual screeching might fairly to be said to be getting a trifle stale. In general, the Boomers have taken the side of Orange Man and Millennials that of Schiff, Pelosi, Bette Midler, Sacha Baron Cohen and further disreputable company, but the petty sniping in hopes of the most minuscule of gains (generally, number of ‘likes’ per thread) remains unchanged. Oh sure, sometimes the roles are reversed (commonly in matters pertaining to racism and ‘unconditional support for Israel’) but this amounts to little more than the equivalent of a bad guy WWF wrestler becoming a good guy for a couple of scripted bouts before reverting back to form again. Let us not forget, also, that the Trump/Never Trump fracas itself was just the latest reiteration of the chronic Republican/Democrat charade of 150 years’ extent, slightly updated to meet the needs of a generation reared on sound bites, scroll-through ‘news’ feeds, and GIF-friendly rapid editing techniques. That’s almost as poppin’ fresh as Bernie Sanders’s Nehru jackets.

Both parties are engaging in vain materialist boastings. Their discourse has come to resemble the refrain in the middle of The Who’s Magic Bus, with Millennials chanting ‘I waaaannit, I waaaaanit, I waaaannnnit’ and Boomers responding with ‘You caaaaaaan’t have it!’ And neither camp has cause to take the moral high ground. Let’s be perfectly frank: had their positions been reversed and each was reared in the conditions of the other, would either have been likely to have improved their perceptions of the societal Telos? Not ruddy likely. We on the Right fully hold to the triumph of Nature over Nurture, and the vagaries of both Plenty and Want have their own unique ways of fostering sin in whichever generation is fortunate or unfortunate enough to reside therein. Their lack of historical reference regarding past generational squabbles further renders their battle royale meaningless. You would think the Boomers, for their part, would remember the fabled ‘generation gap’ that existed between themselves and their Greatest parents, said gap being ensconced in the sociological zeitgeist of the era even more thoroughly than today’s nascent Boomer/Millennial tensions are thanks to a saturated media campaign on the three television networks and limited number of print mediums available then. The fusillade of ‘it’s your fault/no, it’s your fault’ proved to be an excellent means of divide and conquer, and the black militants, Chicano labor agitators, feminist bra-burners, and the Stonewall vanguard of gay liberationists made ample hay out of societal reorganization while debates raged in suburban living rooms over hair length and whatnot.

As for the Millennials, it would behoove them well to consider that Evil did not originate with their Boomer parents. Even the materialist mindset that is stereotypically Boomer cannot be entirely laid at their feet. After all, it was their Greatest parents who insisted that the economic boom of the 50s – which in hindsight turned out to be nothing more than a very temporary fluke, built largely upon the colossal postwar reconstruction of Europe and Asia and the initial frenzy of military overspending in the Cold War’s dawn – was sustainable in perpetuity, as the just due of their inherent Americanism, and who passed on that Pollyannaism to their children. As the Greatests were also definitely one of those ill-fated generations who made an idol out of Work, they also tended to spend an inordinate amount of time in the office or the factory floor or the fields, leaving the raising of their children to the likes of Howdy Doody or the copacetic infrastructures of various Levittowns, as Mother increasingly found her time bound up in bridge games, PTA meetings, chairmanships of women’s committees supporting Governor Nelson Rockefeller for president, and the like.

Can all the blame be laid on the Greatests, then? Nope! After all, they were the children of the Silents, who never met an intrusive socialistic alphabet agency of FDR’s they didn’t immediately fall in love with and who, as the hip ‘flappers’ of the 1920s, first began embracing the tenets of hedonism via free love, abortion on demand (albeit of the back alley variety), and, as Ehud recently documented, frivolous divorce. If it’s ultimate blame we insist on dishing out, I’m afraid we have to go all the way back to our father Adam. And who among us has the moral authority to presume we would have done differently in his fig leaf?

The Scriptures, too, take a dim view of this internecine wrangling. Boomers ought to remember that Paul adjured Timothy to let no man despise his youth (1 Timothy 4:12) and that John commended the young men on their strength which they used, at the urging of the word of God, to overcome the power of Lucifer (1 John 2:13-14). Likewise, Millennials ought to remember that when the insufferable brats mocked Elisha with taunts of ‘Go up, thou bald head’ (the equivalent of ‘ok boomer’ in an epoch bereft of social mediums), a Godly curse from Elisha over their violation of the Fifth Commandment was all it took to turn them into a fast-food lunch for a couple of she-bears who happened to be passing by. (2 Kings 2:23-4) Indeed, while we’re on the subject of Scriptural authority, the past century (and beyond) of generational achievement reads like a litany from the book of Kings:

The Greatests were one and twenty years old when they began to reign.
And they did evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto their fathers, and provoked Him to anger.
The Boomers were five and thirty years old when they began to reign.
And they did evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto their fathers, and provoked Him to anger.
The Gen-Xers were five and fifty years old when they began to reign.
And they did evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto their fathers, and provoked Him to anger.
The Millennials….

Needless to say, neither side has cause to preen at such a track record. What matters it whether the Pharisees or the Sadducees influence the national discourse the most?

So, in summary, all I can say is: a pox on the Boomers.

And a pox on the Millennials.

A pox on Gen-X, as well. Their response to the rift has been typical – to inwardly gloat over it for a time, and then get disgusted and head back over to YouTube to watch commercials from the 80s and grumble about the due glory that was denied them back in the day.

Might as well cast a pox upon the Greatests and the Silents while we’re at it.

Sorry, Gen-Z. Even in the flower of thy youth, you too get a pox.

And were the generations of old so immaculate? I hardly think so. Poxes all around, bartender, if you please.

This whole Boomer/Millennial meme is vainglorious and unedifying, folks. It is an entirely Delphic construction of artificial outrage, which is becoming the norm as the age of online interaction approaches a rather non-stellar middle age. We are all hopelessly fallen – I thought as Calvinists, we understood that. Let us save our precious spiritual ammo for targets besides those within our own ranks who we perceive to be the Other. And let us all, Boomer, Millennial, or otherwise, mull on the words of Proverbs 20:29: ‘The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the gray head.’ Godly might + Godly wisdom = a Godly juggernaut.