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I appreciate and admire this approach: two persuasive articles from somewhat opposing perspectives, written by the same author (who genuinely sees both sides).

Generations overlap. The distinctions between Boomers and X-ers, for instance, are not always clear. I am technically (just barely) a Boomer, if 1964 is still a Boomer birth year. But I feel more part of Gen X, to the extent that I feel part of any generic generation. So the question arises: what good do these generation-names do?

I am not convinced that they do much. The divisions are largely arbitrary--and often serve to pit people artificially against each other. My beef with "OK Boomer" or any generation-naming slur, whether directed toward the older or the younger, is that it writes off the person standing before us, who may have a complex combination of views and attributes.

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You sound like a nice young man and you write very well, but no, it's not right to "point out flaws in [y]our elders’ worldview" -- at least not to their faces -- and not only because there's actually a point to respecting one's elders. You point out the flaws of illiberalism in terms of power, but the progressive obsession with power is just that -- an obsession. The more immediate problem is that it makes people angry, unfriendly, unself-critical and generally unhappy. We can probably agree, boomers and zoomers alike, that mitigating those effects is what power is supposed to be *for* in the first place.

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Shira, Thanks for the visions of both sides of this generational divide. As you point out, it might not make much sense to divide by generations, but there are some differences. As a boomer, I found your description of the woke folk more defined, compelling and even chilling, as the woke minority seems to succeed in silencing the non-woke majority on campus.

But that was focussed on one subset on one generation, so was manageable. We Boomers with so much more history behind us at this point are more difficult to nail in 800 words. We've got a mixed record, I'd say, but that will be one of the ages to judge. To the extent we're seen as complacent or fixated on old ideas or values, that is, as you point out, pretty much the way it's always been, the younger generation impatient with the caution of their elders.

You are right to ask about the price of change, even in terms of the violence it may require. When I see the seemingly ruthless Gen Z propensity for silencing other points of view, I worry the price may be going up if/when they hold the levers of power.

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The difference between “the old” and “the zoomers” is explained, I think, by the difference between MLK and Stokely Carmichael. Both groups admire the dedication of these two men, but I think most of us old folks see that dedication as separate from wokeness, while the zoomers see it as part of wokeness. And that’s why they see wokeness as having a positive side.

At the happy hour, Handa explained that wokeness did have an important message to teach (not his exact words) and that’s why zoomers don’t want to be seen as unwoke. Since his first post argued that the truly woke intimidated most zoomers into silence, I asked him what was the positive side of wokeness.

In reply, he listed all the good things that the truly woke do. But he listed no positive attribute of wokeness. I agreed with him that the woke are especially well-meaning, dedicated people. And he agreed that well-meaning people could do (and have historically done) some truly horrible things. That left open the question, as he pointed out, of whether wokeness was making the woke well-meaning and dedicated or whether the well-meaning and dedicated tended to get caught in the corrupting trap of wokeness.

Carmichael and King, I believe, provide the answer. Before he was woke, Carmichael was a freedom rider and was renowned for his work registering Black voters. At that time, he and King were incredibly dedicated anti-racists and were wide awake regarding social injustice. But they were not woke.

Then Carmichael became the personification of the Black Power movement and the Honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party. In the process, he turned on MLK. He said that “integration was irrelevant when initiated by blacks,” i.e. by the civil rights movement. And that integration was an “insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy” (UC Berkeley, Oct. 29, 1966). By today’s woke standards, intent doesn’t matter so, yes, that would make MLK a white supremacist.

And the Black Panthers, who were at first mainly anti-white, became Marxist-Leninists and required their members to study Mao’s “Little Red Book.” In the end, it was learned that they had brutally tortured and murdered some of their own members.

So I think Handa and I agree on what is wrong with wokism and that the woke are most often particularly well-intentioned and dedicated. But I don’t think Carmichael’s wokeness gets credit for his dedication or good works in the civil rights movement. Instead, I think it helped blot out the best politics our country has ever seen — the politics of civil rights.

Carmichael quotes: http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/scarmichael.html

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All Boomers are the same. All Zoomers are the same. Poor Gen X.

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Charles Buell--I am a pre-Boomer, born in 1940. I rate a very minor footnote in the history of the '60s by spending the summer of 1965 in a moderately successful voter registration project of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I served in Southside Virginia's Surry County, across the James River from Williamsburg. Very frankly, I did not want to go to Alabama, which had been one of the choices. A white volunteer, Viola Liuzzo had been murdered three months before during the Selma marches, and the black guy, Leroy Moton who was in the car with her and survived, was at our training sessions in Atlanta. The string of black Americans who had been killed, was well-known to us, from Emmet Till, killed ten years before, and Medgar Evers two years before.

Fortunately, my time in Virginia was not violent, being trailed by whites a couple of times and getting dirty looks by local whites. My Point? The 1960's volunteers faced violence at home and in Vietnam, but were willing to take the plunge into those two very different issues. The Wokes should take notice.

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My generation, Boomers, were confident in and generally more competent in logical reasoning. This generation is neither, and consequently the Woke have fallen into an all too historically familiar dogmatic slumber and tried to cancel logical reasoning itself. Sophistry is always the final recourse of terrified incompetence.

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If you want to see a case for how much the Boomers did accomplish, check out Leonard Steinhorn's The Greater Generation.

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