This is a little off-topic so I’ll keep this short. Has anyone else noticed that writing reflecting generational prejudice seems to be everywhere these days? Twenty years ago, I would come across occasional snide references to Boomers and roll my eyes and move on. Nowadays, however, it seems that every other article I read on social, political, and cultural issues snipes at one age cohort or another in a completely stereotyped way. I’m not talking about those demographic characteristics that are actually supported by research, but rather about a set of  value judgments that pretend to interpret the statistics and very often substitute entirely for any consideration of facts. Boomers: entitled and selfish. Millennials: lazy and dependent. Sound familiar? Exactly. It’s a peculiar form of agism that can be aimed at any age range of choice (as opposed to just those who rank as ‘old’ in the eyes of the writer).

Given all the ongoing conversations aimed at eliminating other forms of prejudice—homophobia, racism, sexism—when and how did it become ok to tag large groups of people as defective according to when they were born? There is a good deal of really quite silly discussion about whether specific labels apply (Millennials: just dependent or also lazy?), but practically none that I’ve read suggesting that this kind of labeling is odious on the face of it. I find myself wondering what larger function this outburst of generational prejudice is serving. Could it be a way of bleeding off energy that could otherwise be applied to discussing the economics of class in America? Generational warfare instead of ‘class warfare’?