OK, boomers: It’s 100 percent our fault that Key West and the world have gone sideways. We are the reason we’re arguing over rainbow pickets, morphing home rule into a historical relic, stalking the globe as a deranged, self-anointed emperor and chanting “we win; you lose.” We are the GOAT “Me Generation.”

The first of us were born in 1946. We made up 40 percent of the U.S. population in 1964. At our peak in 1999, there were 79 million of us and we dominated the world order. By 2030, we’ll have dwindled to a saggy-baggy 69 million. But I bet we’ll still refuse to cede power to our kids and grandkids because boomers categorically believe we know best even if our brains are age-addled.

It’s noteworthy that pediatrician and lefty activist Dr. Benjamin Spock published “Baby and Child Care” in 1946. But the how-to-parent book was the bible for our parents — and the first modern experiment with the idea that parents can know more than experts. Is it any wonder that a culture of “parents over experts” has evolved to produce a new generation of adults who upend mandatory vaccines, public schools and institutional order?

On Aug. 23, 1976 New York magazine’s cover story was a Thomas Wolfe essay that coined the phrase the “Me Decade.” It was a pointed dissection of the boomer generation’s penchant for narcissism and individualism and for self-actualization over community good. The “Me Generation” label quickly replaced the “Me Decade.”

Boomers are, as a generational cohort, rigid, righteous and reactive. I’ll call it RR&R for short. In simple words: “I’m right; you’re wrong. Who cares about the group; this is all about me. Let’s fight.” That’s a different paradigm from the two generations before and two after us: For them, collaboration among and for the group outweighs individual rights.

If you can swallow that, read on. If not, go fume on social media about how you’re a good boomer cuz you believe in DEI and social justice. But WE — and I need to capitalize that because I like to think I’m a “good” boomer — are still boomers and we are rigid, righteous and reactive when it comes to what we believe. Don’t be shocked, though, when equally RR&R boomers, from city commissioners and state legislators to the entirety of the D.C. clown circus, think they’re righter, so to speak.

We’ve become a classic boomer meme — the RR&R right and the RR&R left.

Baby boomers | 80 years of the “Me Generation”

A friend’s social media post this week got me thinking about RR&R. He posted two photos, one of a rainbow picket fence and a second of a fence festooned with religious and secular Easter decorations. He asked: “Do either of these photos offend you?” Shrug. You do you. I hung a rainbow mailbox. My neighbor put up a protest sign next to his rainbow pickets. Christmas decorations and lighted menorahs don’t offend me either. But for what it’s worth, we’re all fulfilling our RR&R baby boomer thing: Mine good, yours not.

Just when Key West was THIS close to working out a collaborative local solution for painted pickets, rainbow crosswalks and recognition of the island’s LGBTQ Pride history with an arch at Petronia and Duval, along comes the mother of all RR&R home rule laws: the “Anti-Diversity in Local Government” law, a combo of Florida SB 1134 and HB 1001, which goes into effect July 1.

That law forbids “counties and municipalities... from funding or promoting or taking official action as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion.” Not only does it encourage residents to sue municipalities if they’re offended, but it includes provisions for the state to remove and replace elected officials it deems having run afoul of it.

(Screeching halt sounds here.) Until years of litigation resolve the law’s vague and potentially unconstitutional language, Key West has lost its rights to protect, celebrate and promote its legendary history that blends diversity, equity and inclusion into one occasionally weird, but functional, libertarian island.

Rigid. Righteous. Reactive. That’s where 80 years of Me Generation boomer culture has brought us, staring across a philosophical divide and dug into our RR&R positions.

Here’s what this aging boomer says: Those sneaky little boomer buggers in Tallahassee and their minions throughout the state have decided if one can’t pass as a straight, white male and if the event/project/whatever doesn’t reek of mid-century Rockwell, we’re being systematically disappeared. I lived and fought through those decades. It’s tiresome and unjust to replow that ground but that’s just what we have to do.