Zoomers (Gen Z) & Millennials Maybe Woke, But Boomers Went for Broke!
Yesteryear actions spoke louder than today’s toxic words
In his Feb 22, 2021 New York Times essay, “Woke Me When It’s Over,” conservative columnist, Bret Stephens — concerned about a woke culture that was going overboard “with the new ethos of moral bullying,” — came to this rather grim conclusion:
“In the game of Woke, the goal posts can be moved at any moment, the penalties will apply retroactively and claims of fairness will always lose out to the perpetual right to claim offense.”
In response to his article, I had then commented online, in part, as follows:
“Condé Nast trying to get woke about past transgressions is a fool’s errand. It’s more useful to let the past guide you so that you can be woke in the present and in the future. Having said that there are fundamental issues in America’s past that all Americans need to get woke about. In many conservative circles, especially Trump followers, there is a general distaste for being woke, which includes a disregard for facts and science on various issues relating to education, elections, environment, health, et al.”
Fifteen minutes of shame.
A few days later, on February 26, 2021, speaking from the liberal end of the spectrum, comedian Bill Maher ripped into woke culture in the “New Rules” segment of his “Real Time with Bill Maher” show on HBO. This is what he said, in part:
“…liberals need a ‘stand your ground’ law for cancel culture so that when the woke mob comes after you for some ridiculous offense, you’ll stand your ground. Stop apologizing because I can’t keep up anymore with who’s on the shit list.”
Mr. Maher went on to add:
“…Is this really who we want to become? A society of phony clenched asshole avatars, walking on eggshells, always looking over your shoulder about getting ratted out for something that actually has nothing to do with your character or morals? Think about everything you’ve ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged, or said in passing or now even just witnessed someone had a Confederate flag in their dorm room in 1990 and you didn’t do anything. You laughed at a Woody Allen movie. Andy Warhol was wrong. In the future, everyone will not experience fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen minutes of shame.”
Between woke and coma there is a space.
In that selfsame NYT comment on Mr. Stephens’ 2/21/21 essay, I had concluded as follows:
If there had to be an antonym for woke, it would have to be “coma,” as in, die-hard Trumpists have gotten coma about the aforementioned issues and even some of America’s past deadly sins. So, if Mr. Stephens’ liberal friend likes to joke, “Woke me when it’s over,” then does he also have a conservative counterpart, who quips, “Coma me until Trumpism is done.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor had posited:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Now, let’s consider sampling the U.S. population for “Woke-Coma” behavior. In the resulting graph, a 100% woke response would occupy the far-left end of spectrum and 100% comatose behavior would take up the far-right end. If, as expected, the “Woke-Coma” behavioral sample follows the normal distribution associated with a Bell curve, 95% of people will fall within the second standard deviation and 68% of people will lie within the first standard deviation. So, Mr. Stephens and Mr. Maher can rest assured that at least two-thirds of the population is neither crazy woke nor deeply comatose! Suffice it to say that over two-thirds of the population’s response to “Woke-Coma” events is likely not driven by politically correct or incorrect considerations. This despite a preponderance of social media pressures — per recent reports, the Twitterverse has ~38 million monetizable daily active users in the U.S. and Facebook has ~260 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada — in our contemporary culture. Nonetheless, we must continue to grow better as a society, even when our individual freedoms, especially ones related to the first amendment, face perennial challenges.
Boomers are OK… really!
In their heyday, Boomers weren’t woke by today’s standards, but they were hardly comatose. In a previous Medium post, “The Man Who Would Be King — Vote Him Out Of Office,” I had defined SPECS as an acronym for the overall Societal, Political, Economic, Cultural and Spiritual ecosystem that exists in a nation at any given period in time. Using the SPECS standard, I had differentiated between liberals and conservatives as follows:
“There is a simplistic way of defining the two primary ideologies — conservative and liberal — at each end of the SPECS ecosystem. Liberals tend to look at their nation’s past SPECS using contemporary (i.e., modern, progressive) lenses. While conservatives are inclined to view their country’s contemporary SPECS using yesteryear’s (i.e., old, regressive) lenses. So, we have liberals in the U.S. — primarily those at the progressive end of the spectrum — judging political actions and policies implemented during the civil rights decade of the 1960s or the “tough on crime” decade of the 1990s with the hindsight that a more “woke” 2020 affords them. On the other hand, we have conservatives — particularly those at the fundamentalist end of the spectrum — bemoaning the state of a more diverse, modern-day America and yearning for the segregated “Leave it to Beaver” suburbia of the 1950s or longing for the “greed is good” decade of the 1980s without acknowledging the deleterious socio-economic impact those decades had on a majority of Americans outside of the top 1% from a wealth and income standpoint.”
Woke “Zoo-Mills” must remember that the Baby Boomer generation, including its active counterculture component, fought for transformational changes in the 1960s and 1970s through meaningful protests and actions. It achieved tremendous progress across our national SPECS spectrum, notwithstanding the comparatively archaic communications infrastructure of that era. Boomers did not have the luxury of an instantaneous and interactive internet, social media, and smartphones in the palm of their hands. Yet, they fought for and/or vigorously pursued the implementation of various SPECS’ causes and rights — civil, employment, environmental, gay, integration, labor, voting, women’s, et al. — that we take for granted today. But then there is that other seminal event from that era, which forever clouds the Boomer generation — fairly or unfairly.
The Baby Boomer War.
The greatest irony of the Vietnam War was that some baby boomer kids protested it at home, even as other baby boomer counterparts served in it abroad. James Wright, a historian, and a president emeritus of Dartmouth College, had written in an April 11, 2017, New York Times column titled, “The Baby Boomer War:”
“Of all the tropes about the Vietnam War, one stands out far above the rest in American memory: It was the baby boomers’ war. By the spring of 1967, most American soldiers being killed in combat had been born in 1946 or after.”
Mr. Wright went on to reveal:
“In popular memory, the boomers quickly turned against the war. Many did, but many also served. Over 10 million boomers served in the military, some 40 percent of the males of their generation. Many of them served in Vietnam. More baby boomers died in Vietnam than went to Canada or to prison for refusing to serve.”
From a dispassionate standpoint, it’s obvious that Boomers’ actions — across the SPECS spectrum — spoke volumes. In fact, during their heyday, Boomers contributed to a significant transformation of our society. Boomers maybe cheugy now but back then they were hip!
“Turn on, tune in, drop out” or just chill!
After being acquitted of larceny and fraud charges in 1987, Raymond J. Donovan, President Reagan’s Labor Secretary, famously said:
“Which office do I go to get my reputation back?”
In today’s hypersensitive media environment, it’s easy for anyone, especially crazy woke “Zoo-Mill” types to criticize and cancel. But an impulsive cancel culture does not contribute to overall healing and harmony. In today’s social media world, texted (in)justice is often dispensed in a hurry, sometimes before all the evidence is in. We can’t willy-nilly destroy people’s reputations and careers through toxic messaging. In his May 13, 2021, NYT column, “This Is How Wokeness Ends,” David Brooks came to this rather woke conclusion that should appeal to 95% of the people within the second standard deviation of the aforementioned “Woke-Coma” Bell curve:
“As I say, there are (at least) two elements to wokeness. One focuses on concrete benefits for the disadvantaged — reparations, more diverse hiring, more equitable housing and economic policies. The other instigates savage word wars among the highly advantaged. If we can have more of the former and less of the latter, we’ll all be better off.”
So, maybe it’s time for some of these “Zoo-Mill” social media vigilantes to do what some Boomers did in their day — “turn on, tune in, drop out” — but without the use of psychedelics! That is, just chill! It would do well for all of us to remember Mr. Frankl’s wise words, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response…” We need to choose our response wisely because as the saying goes, “karma is a bitch” and you don’t want her coming around when you least expect it — that could hamper your growth and freedom.
