Boomer is a strange word. According to the Oxford dictionary (for example) it has two different meanings. Very different meanings.
Especially the so-called ‘disambiguation’ page of ‘Boomer’ in Wikipedia is an illustration of why that medium has such a bad name. As so often, the Dutch version compares badly with the English version:
Babyboom (demografie), geboortegolf (“boomer” is oorspronkelijk een verkorting van “babyboomer” maar wordt in jongerentaal wel voor oudere en ouderwetse personen gebruikt).
Translation: “Baby boom (demography), baby boom (“boomer” is originally a shortening of “baby boomer” but is used in youth language for older and old-fashioned people.”
These authors apparently consider the use of that term as a term of abuse to be the most obvious … As if ‘youth language‘ were a well-defined concept!
About eleven years ago I took a closer look at baby booms, especially the remarkably large difference between European countries in terms of the years.
Link to it and most important image from it you find in the last section of this blogpost.
Communists of all kinds
Recently I experienced a special version of that insulting with the word ‘boomer’.
It came from someone who was affiliated with a Dutch party that is literally called ‘Socialist Party‘. The party was actually founded by two members of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) in response to tension between the Soviet-Russian and Chinese communists: the two pleaded unequivocally for a Maoist course!
They founded an organization called the Marxist-Leninist Center. Shortly after, the name became MLCN. A few years later, both of the original founders had their own party. One was called Kommunistische Eenheidsbeweging Nederland (Communist Unity Movement) and the other Kommunistische Partij van Nederland (Communist Party of the Netherlands). This meant that only the first letter differed from that of the party from which they both originated: the Communist Party! [1]
In 1972 it became the Socialist Party. Later in the 1970s, enthusiasm for communist China waned. One Jan Marijnissen became de facto party leader. Since 2017, his daughter Lillian has that role …
Only in 1994 (!) did this party win two seats in parliament. In 2006 that number had grown to 25, but since then it has continually decreased. The number has already shrunk to 9 and all polls predict further decline.
And that while the leaders of that party are increasingly trying to come across as a social-democratic party at a time when the party that previously represented this decent ideology (PvdA) and once occupied more than ⅓ of all seats in parliament, is now merging / being swallowed up by an activist party that mainly profiles itself as an ‘environmental party’ (“GroenLinks” ≈ Greens).
Bubbles of all kinds
Also fairly recently, a fierce internal battle took place in that party in which the youth section, called ‘Rood’ (= Red) played a leading role.
Even more recently, I asked the mother party via Twitter if they had an opinion on a position of that youth organization on transgenderism (!).
Someone from that ‘Rood’ pointed out to me that this organization split from the parent party two years ago. My description suggest that it was a sensible and polite reaction, but in reality that reaction was a special illustration of a special body of ideas: with an image of an old woman behind a walker, this fanatically sporting (post-[1]) Boomer was reproached for not being aware of that split and/or ‘mass expulsion’!
It honestly took a few minutes for the enormity of it to sink in.
And here I am not referring to the fact that I was accused of not being sufficiently aware of the infighting among the former and contemporary followers of Lenin (the self-invented pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov).
No, I am concerned with the implicit view of the “Bubble” I am in: the group of people who take to heart the wise words of the greatest statesman of all time, Winston Churchill: “Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft” [2].
Boomers of all kinds
The relevant passage in that eleven years old original Dutch text was titled: ‘Begetting children versus fatherhood‘. (The complete blogpost was titled: It is the culture, silly one).
That title was inspired by the fact that in the second halve of the 20th century there had been quite striking differences in population growth between the Netherlands on the one hand and Italy and the other so-called PIGS countries (Portugal, Greece and Spain) on the other.
But why did they have so much fewer children in these countries than in the Netherlands?
Did the quality of their sperm deteriorate more quickly, were they so much poorer that they considered it irresponsible to have children, were they even more impressed by the threat of ‘overpopulation’, was childcare so much less organized, did they want to stand even more strongly against the (Catholic) Church?
By comparing the population pyramids of the Netherlands and Italy, another possible explanation emerged. A culturally based one.
When looking at population pyramids you have to keep a very close eye on one thing: the data about the past is -certainly in a European context- hard, that of the future butter soft. The insidious thing is that these different data often appear in the same image!
The amazing thing about the Dutch baby boom was that it did not start in 1946!
Only in 1940 and 1944 fewer children were born than in 1939, but in ’41, ’42 and ’43 that number grew considerably and really exploded from 1945 to 1949.
In Italy, the number of children grew not so fast during the war and much less explosively afterwards.
The ‘booming’ there took a little longer. An interesting difference, and a larger and many times more interesting difference, is that the Netherlands had a kind of ‘follow-up’ boom from 1959 to 1969, while at the same time in Italy the downward trend in the number of births continued unabated.
The increased resources and propensity to use contraceptives apparently had a much more drastic effect in Italy. Some special papal influence in Italy?
In my opinion, the explanation must be sought in the different reactions of men in different countries to women’s emancipation in general and to the freedom offered by the possibilities of contraception in particular.
To exaggerate it a bit: northern men embraced the role of caring father, southern men went through puberty longer and stayed with their mamma. Women who doubted whether they wanted children were more encouraged by those immatures.
Meanwhile, men who love children need not be child molesters or sissies: they can also be adults, who are not afraid of fatherhood or even know the blessings of it.
A ‘good family man’ also pays attention to the money. He is not going to pour it into the bottomless pits of parasitic single people from other countries …
The texts in red in the image below translate as: “Our baby boom: earlier and fiercer” and “We a second-boom, they a continuing decline in the number of births“.
I have not checked whether the forecast for the year 2050 in the third row looks different now. The influx of people from Africa and the Middle East is large in both the Netherlands and Italy, but many of those men who manage to get into Italy want to travel on to the Netherlands and other north-western European countries.
Notes
- Less than one letter in a sense, because at that time quite a few Dutch words were spelled differently by ‘progressives’: words in which the ‘C’ was pronounced as ‘K’ were also written as ‘K’.)
- See also this blog post about the conquest of ‘Africa’ by Charles V, a Painting by Gaspar de Crayer.