"OK, Boomer"

In reaction to the War on Baby Boomers waged by Gen Z: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/style/ok-boomer.html

Homework by Allen Ginsberg 

If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran

I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds
and elephants back in the jungle,

I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,   

Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,   

Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean
basin & make it azure again,

Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as
snow,

Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie   

Then I’d throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,

Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S.
Central American police state,

& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.

In his poem "Homework," Allen Ginsburg wishes to wash the world of its dirt, put it out to dry,
and make it clean again, a sentiment I’m sure many of us share now. “If only we could get back to the
Good Ole Days.” The piece was written in Boulder, Colorado in 1980, decades before Greta Thunberg
and mainstream climate activism, yet Ginsberg seems just as bewildered by the state of his world before
Generation Z was even a thought in its parents’ minds. There's a lot of debate about whether Gen Z's
struggles (with mental health) are unique or if we're just particularly dramatic or self diagnostic. I'm not
sure if the idea of an unclean world is transcendent of era or if Ginsberg was equally as concerned (by
our politics, international relations, social norms, the whole host of -isms, and our fate) back then as we
are now. Certainly things have changed since the ‘80s. The easy answer is social media, which has
provided a constant influx of other realities, the harsher the more highlighted, to compare to our own.
Instagram and Twitter compliment, and often moonlight as, the 24 hour news cycle that won’t give our
impending doom a rest. Despite the climate crisis, heightened division, a lack of political civility, a lack
of empathy, is Gen Z truly any more burdened or mentally ill than those that came before? Or are
heightened levels of Anxiety and Depression the prices to pay for the destigmatization of discourse about
mental health, discussion of societal failures, and “global mindedness?” Ginsberg had a lot of dirt he
wished to scrub from the face of the Earth. What would our poems wish to wash away? Would they be
longer?