Y’all remember that ‘Ok Boomer’ meme from a couple years back? Well, here’s you’re first grown up lesson as grown ups: careful who you mock because you will be on the receiving end eventually.

Oh, we Boomers still love y’all and we do feel for you, but it is so incredibly funny watching Millennials and Zoomies freaking out and panicking because Russia decided to act like Russia and China still wants to rule the world. Actually, it’s hysterical. It’s almost as fun as watching your mom run screaming from a non-existent mouse, only in HD with special effects!

<insert laugher here>

*snicker* Okay, okay, I’m over it… No, I’m not!

We pause this blog while our author busts a gut… or two. Sheesh, it’s not that funny… *snicker* Okay, maybe it is…

Five minutes later:

Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, the kiddies being terrified of normal politics.

The last thirty years were not normal. The fall of the Soviet Union pretty much left the West without much to do, besides tracking down all the nukes those idiots lost. The American belief that freedom and prosperity would change Russia and China wasn’t completely wrong, but it was naïve. Corporations were falling all over themselves to get at those huge markets and cheap labor China offered, with their usual lack of common sense.

Those forces, along with several others, kind of put international relations on pause. The Middle East decided that it didn’t want the US any more PO’d than it already was after 9/11 so they made sure to behave themselves. At least enough to not start anything else they couldn’t handle. That stabilized the Middle East as stable as it gets and put the War on Terror on autopilot.

Nice, peaceful – for Earth – and calm for the best part of thirty years as far as normal people could tell. Americans did what they did best and put government on cruise control. Europeans followed suit and no one paid any attention to any of the folks pointing out that all was not well in Denmark.

On the home front, we were busy with electing the first African American president then trying to prove that we were all still closet racists. We ignored the increasingly nutty crap coming from both our institutions and government. After all, only those crazy conspiracy theory people worry about some Princeton professor advocating infanticide. We have important stuff to worry about. After all, soccer is at five!

Until we could no longer figure out what a woman was and Russia decided to go all imperialist on us. Sheesh, you take your eye off the road for a few decades…

None of what’s going on in the world happened overnight, including the panicdemic. All the machinations as Russia and China try to defeat the US have been simmering for years, probably all along. The world did not suddenly get more dangerous; it just got in-your-face real.

The oldest Boomers can remember ‘Duck and Cover’ drills. I can recall the debates about whether disarmament was even a good idea when there were at least 40,000 nuclear weapons already in the world. The current nuclear stockpiles will definitely screw up the planet but we Boomers grew up in a world likely to be vaporized if someone made a bad mistake.

Honestly, I think the Nineties were a lot more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis but the latter was in everyone’s face. Make no mistake, it was a very, very dangerous thing but nuclear proliferation had the potential to infinitely more dangerous.

Fortunately, nuclear warheads ain’t cheap or easy to produce. Once we found most of the Soviet’s wayward stockpile and talked Ukraine into giving Russia back its deadly toys, the risk from nuclear proliferation declined dramatically. Some of you Zoomies don’t even know what I’m talking about. Well, if warheads ever become easy to produce, you will find out the hard way. Let’s pray that never happens.

Basically, you kiddies grew up in the political version of Never Never Land. You were taught to be incensed over ancient history but not how to read your own times. Well, you didn’t grow up with the fear we knew, which was part of why we Boomers were more interested in you having good self esteem than being able to read a book, let alone the political landscape. That may have been a mistake, but we weren’t the ones that told you to value equity over equality.

That would be your idiot professors. We didn’t want to throw you little bums into the job market with nothing, and our parents thought college was a good idea. Dang, who knew?

If you were all ten, then it would be different. But you are grown ups now. Education begins when school ends. You have a literal university in your pocket and have no idea how to use a card catalog – you get no slack for not finding out for yourselves when it is so much easier for you than it was for us. Heck, your phones don’t even have cords!

Plenty of history channels all over streaming services and video aggregators – that’s Netflix and YouTube, you whippersnappers! – as well as more educational material than you could watch in a lifetime. Instead you spend hours on Tik Tok watching stupid people do even stupider things. And we Boomers thought our attention spans were short!

Okay, school is in session: You don’t have all the answers. You don’t even understand half the questions. No one does. We get through this craziness by working together, not coding in your closet. Sorry, but real life is knocking.

Before you get on WeChat and tell China how mean I’m being to you, get yourself together. If you want to spend the next decade scared out of your mind, keep watching only entertainment and ignoring the rest of the world. If you want to waste all your strength fighting for a solution that can’t work, keep listening to only what you agree with politically and not thinking about what is being said.

But if you’d like to leave the planet a better place than it was when you got here, then it’s time to smarten up. Get educated – it’s literally free. Get motivated – when the world knocks on your door it’s way too late. Get over yourselves – you ain’t that special, no one is. And get a clue – people matter which is why all that political stuff matters.

It is funny watching you smart alecs wet yourselves over what we Boomers consider normal. It’s also sad. Whatever mistakes the older generations made, what’s done is done. We can’t go back and raise you differently. But YOU decide where you are going from here.

And how scared you will be.