“Boomer Remover”: Is Ageism to the Coronavirus What Homophobia was to HIV?
With the culture wars only getting hotter, can America convince shell-shocked, rightly cynical Millennials and Zoomers to wash their hands?
In our social media-powered world, America couldn’t possibly have picked a worse time to have a pandemic on its hands than right now, especially a bug that tends to kill old people. The murk that composes our political and cultural discourse, both online and off, has thickened to an inky super-goop through which no light can escape.
Anyone to the left of televangelist huckster Jim Bakker has at least a vague grasp of the most prominent factor contributing to spreading confusion about the virus. The most prominent media henchmen of the Trumpist right are crazily spreading disinformation about the severity of the bug, dismissing it as nothing more serious than the common cold. Such tedious, baseless nonsense can be expected to continue until further notice, being that it combines the things that Republican pundits love most: macho posturing, willful ignorance of scientific facts, and a measure of protection for Trump, whose green-eyed hatred of Barack Obama prompted him to force out the chiefs of the vital set of political bodies that Obama originally put in place in an effort to ensure institutional battle readiness for pandemics by making it easier for agencies like the CDC to do their jobs.
That’s the easy part, of course. By now, every non-Trump voter knows that if there’s going to be a Republican response to basically anything, it’ll skew in favor of putting all mankind at risk. What particularly alarms me is the current state of the “new generation gap,” in which it appears that a few too many Millennial and Generation Z kids may have reached the point where they see the elder-reaping coronavirus as some sort of minor miracle, a long-overdue stopgap measure against the boomer-enabled neoliberal political system, and plus, it comes with the side benefit of a couple of weeks downtime.
How do we know that the young feel it’s not too soon to make fun of (mainly) older citizens dying of COVID-19? Well, the virus is already being referred to by younger internet users as “boomer remover,” a meme which is — if you’ll pardon — going viral (if it hasn’t yet made it to your humble Facebook feed, just wait a bit). Yes, we have at last reached the stage in our inter-generational culture war at which progressive-minded young adults see nothing less than the outbreak of a senior-citizen-killing plague as the only way to purge the system of pro-establishment voters, after which young adults can at last vote their way out of their various financial predicaments (student loans, et al) and stop feeling like they have no political voice whatsoever (poll after poll has shown that voters under 35 overwhelmingly support progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders over former vice president Joe Biden, while the reverse is true for older voters).
Is young peoples’ resentment of the establishment-empowering senior set similar to the homophobia that prevented the AIDS epidemic from being contained? Only mildly, if that. COVID-19 directly threatens everyone, without regard to race or identity, thus it’s being taken much more seriously by the general public than was HIV when it first appeared in the 1980s, when it was basically ignored, hastily misidentified as a “strictly gay” disease. No, regardless of what any would-be troll might fling into the internet, what Americans really need to fear this time is not a few casual, mean-spirited memes but unprecedented governmental incompetence. Even at such an early stage of the outbreak, the Trump response has been a laughingstock, a fact that hasn’t been lost on the internet-hip, a very few of whom, sadly, may believe that older folks had the catastrophe coming to them for having allowed someone like Trump to win the 2016 election.
As disturbing as it might look to older people, the “boomer remover” meme is really just pointed black comedy, the sort of gag to which younger, “very online” folks are well accustomed. No sane young person wants their parents to die, of course, nor any of their elderly friends and relatives, their teachers, their mentors. It’s a harmless steam-blowing expression of general despair, largely relegated to the political left, a show of disdain for the American political process itself, where an unstoppable brigade of older, hopelessly brainwashed voters with plenty of time to go voting have blindly thrown their support to Biden, more owing to his Obama-stamped brand recognition than for anything he’d do for young voters, which, the consensus goes, probably wouldn’t be much, if going by just one of Biden’s not-greatest hits, specifically when he grumped during an LA Times interview, “…the younger generation now tells me how tough things are — give me a break! No, no, I have no empathy for it.”
In fairness, during the state presidential primaries that have been held thus far, Millennials and Zoomers haven’t shown up to vote for Sanders in the droves he desperately needs. I’d say that stems from the traditional, disengaged “what, me worry” attitude that’s unique to the young and hungry, people at that frenzied stage of adulthood that, unfortunately, also portends a very probable reluctance on the part of busy young go-getters to, as Pulitzer-winning pandemic expert Laurie Garrett suggests, practice hour-to-hour hygiene if one wants to protect oneself from COVID-19, scrubbing like mad in the obsessive manner one would practice if one were trying to prevent the common cold. Indeed, why, many young people may be reasoning, should I wash my hands every half-hour, much less put my social life on hold by avoiding bars, restaurants, and other large gatherings, since who knows, it’s probably too late to stop the virus’ spread?
Moreover, a distracted mindset could easily think, where’s the governmental leadership? The only thing about the cumulative response to the outbreak that’s been patently obvious to anyone of any age is that the Trump administration has no idea what it’s doing (for starters, at this writing, there’s been no temporary federal order to close all of America’s public schools, unlike in Japan, France, and even Iran).
Until the bodies actually start piling up and too many young people have their lives changed forever because of it, there will be, as always, some horrible content to deal with on the internet relative to the crisis. But meanwhile, some internet/meme-culture enthusiasts are able to temper their anger and deliver their messages without using meme code. As one Twitter user posted, “The way boomers are feeling about coronavirus is the way Millennials and Gen Z folks feel about climate change all the time.”
As for the uber-hip, YouTube-watching, establishment-hating political personalities of the progressive left, they see the virus as a bugbear to be leveraged, a way to get oldsters to stay out of the political process. After Sanders’ Super Tuesday drubbing, the stars of the Chapo Trap House podcast were firing off one “stupid boomer voters” joke after another, urging their listeners to warn older voters that the virus risk is much greater in places like school gymnasiums and other places where voting takes place.
The “boomer remover” meme is a harmless gag, yes, but it comes from a place of deep resentment within the hearts of the beleaguered young. Funnily enough, a few weeks ago, just before news of the virus had broken wide, I spoke to a Millennial and his Zoomer wife, who've been house-shopping for over a year with no luck whatsoever. Never any good prices, never any good news, never a break. The boomers have houses, they’re convinced, and the young have jack. “If the boomers would just die,” muttered the man at one point.
I didn’t ask if he meant his mom and dad too, figuring it was a pretty stupid question.
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Eric W. Saeger is author of “Russian Nazi Troll Bots!: The Busy Person’s Guide to How Trump’s Trolls Won the Internet, What’s Ahead, and What You Can Do.”
