Fun While It Lasted But It's Gone The Way Of All Kew-el Catch Phrases

My mother had a cousin who was an only child who married another only child and they never had children.  They socialized only with people in their own age cohort and mostly had little to do with people younger than them.  They both died in the early years of this century but when they'd visit they sounded like people who were frozen in the 1940s, using slang that I only ever heard in old movies, expressing opinions that moved on little from then.  I loved them both dearly and enjoyed listening to them - they were seldom in a room where they didn't dominate the conversation - it was like living history when they came to visit.  My mother used to shake her head at how lost in time they were, noting that they didn't have much exposure to people younger than they were. 

As someone who enjoyed younger people saying "OK, boomer" to the full-of-themselves members of my age cohort who, like my mother's dear, fondly remembered cousins, don't seem to notice that younger people have moved on, I have to say that what was funny has now become what I suspected it would as recently as last December.

I do have a word of warning to the young people who are enjoying the "OK boomer" thing.   You want to watch out that you're not doing what the boomers did as you're making fun of us.  I might never have bought into the worst of 60s youth self-righteousness but I could have learned something from people I should have taken more seriously.  Just not the ones TV and pop-culture was telling me to listen to.   Pop culture is commercial shit about 98% of the time.  That goes for the "counter culture" stuff as sold, too. 

These catch phrases and slogans just about always turn into that, they're a lazy substitute for thinking.  Maybe it's a general rule that even the good lines go old really fast, like even the best of jokes.  Jokes sometimes carry a nugget of truth but that won't carry them past that stage of stagnation.  The slogans and buzz words, they usually don't even have that much energy in them. 

It's too bad, there should be some way to wise up the geezers and coots of my age cohort without becoming what you're making fun of, yourselves.  Maybe making better points and arguments?   Too much like work?  Well, yeah, I've been arguing with those jerks for fifty years, myself.