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Drowning Out The Boomers
Millennial Ambivalence, Gen Z Rage, & Boomer Remover
“Why don’t we just let them die?”
I have heard this a lot when talking about the Coronavirus, when the subject of Boomers comes up (those born roughly from 1946 to 1964).
When a group of young people chats over Zoom, Facebook, or Teams about the direction of this disease, someone will often half-jokingly bring up this point. They will claim that the disease impacts older adults more severely, which, statistically, is the group more likely to deny climate change and doubt wealth inequality.
This logic is, of course, untrue. The disease does affect more people than just the elderly, and even if it were true, that perverted logic would still be condemning millions of people’s loved ones — people you and I both love — to die. It would be wrong under any circumstance to condemn millions to perish.
Despite the vileness of this argument, however, I can empathize with it sometimes.
There was a neighbor (let’s call her Mary) who I would visit every other day during my teenage years. Her husband had died over a decade before I started visiting with her. She was retired, and very lonely. I would go over to her house and listen to her talk for hours at a time as we debated everything from classic literature to…
