Dave Byrnes Column: Don't Cry For Trumpers, They're Already Dead

ILLINOIS — This week, Illinois conservatives joined like-minded individuals in Colorado and Michigan to protest the ongoing state-mandated coronavirus closures.

That's the news headline. That's the neutral, professional statement.

But it isn't the truth.

The truth is that these people aren't protesting the government, state or otherwise. They're protesting their sudden lack of creature comforts. They don't want the state to change in any meaningful way — they just want to go back to Old Country Buffet.

That's about the most Boomer-mindset thing I've ever heard of. A whole generation of the white middle class - and those that aspire to become like them - declaring in one voice,

"Give me Olive Garden, or give other people death."

And I mean that literally. Despite the martyrdom talk from some of them, these are not people demanding the state give them the chance to sacrifice their lives on some vaunted altar of The Economy. Instead, they're saying that they're willing to sacrifice the lives of the people who they believe should serve them. Waiters and cooks and hairdressers and drivers and cleaners. The overwhelmingly young, working class and non-white.

It's not a coincidence that many of those involved in the protests are either white, over 50, or both. How could they be anyone else? White people born between the late 40s and early 60s — Boomers —are easily the most economically prosperous group of people in human history, and just like class and race are conflated in America, so are class and age. They've spent more than 50 years as this country's official protagonists; every legislation, every institution, every cent of public spending since World War II has been made to benefit them. They are the Golden Children of Capitalism, and their legacy of living it up is such that conservative millenials have been trying follow in their footsteps for years.

So now, even in the face of an existential threat to which they are particularly vulnerable, Boomers refuse to let go of the delusion that this world exists for their pleasure. So many of them and their millennial successors are now acting out that delusion on a national stage.

In Colorado, doctors and nurses came out to counterprotest these brave folks demanding their endless soup and salad, pointing out as astutely as they could what happens when pandemic crisis measures end prematurely. A second wave of disease, possibly worse than the first, is what awaits this country if Illinois' or any other state's government gives in to the whining of a generation who never learned to wait their turn, and that of their younger conservative imitators.

Don't think so?

The history of the Spanish Flu shows otherwise.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Generational politics are vapid, after all. Everyone hates the generation that came before them, and usually the one that comes after them, too. Surely members of the boomer cohort, and the modern conservative movement they helped create, have a history of acting responsibly and compassionately during other public health crises.

Or perhaps not.

Dave Byrnes is a Chicago-born editor for Patch currently covering the villages of Oswego, Plainfield, Romeoville and Bolingbrook. He wishes conservatives - and that includes so-called "centrists" - would understand that their ignorance endangers everyone, but knows they won't.