I found myself in a pretty general online forum where people go to waste time. I was wasting mine too.

At some point some ancient codger (by which I mean my age or maybe a decade older), started bloviating about Kids Today, and eventually it all devolved into the tired obscene bullshit about how The Kids are soft, and coddled, what with needing safe spaces, and participation trophies … I know you’ve heard it all before in those very words.

Listen here Gramps, you smug self-satisfied toad.

I know you want me to stare deeply into the spiral of the Good War against the first Hitler, and believe with all my heart that Liberating Europe from his scourge gave the liberators a long lifetime of immunity against any other crimes they might commit. I know you want me to believe that America is still great, except for those damned commie teachers brainwashing all the children into helpless slaves for life.

Most of all, you want me to believe that you, you personally, are a good man and that everything you ever did was the right thing, and that your traditionalist values are the only thing that can save the land of the free in these dark times.

Perhaps needless to say, you can fuck right off and take your dirt nap at your earliest available convenience if you really want to make the world a better place.

Seventy-some years ago, specifically by May 8, 1945, America collectively did a nominally good thing, a good violent thing, against that ugly little Austrian and his jackbooted minions. The US played their part in helping Russia defeat the Nazi threat. (American military casualties in WW2: about four hundred thousand. Russia: At least seven million, along with another 10-15 million civilians on the side. Check it here.)

Three months later, on August 6-9, the heroes who did France and Italy a notable service suddenly twisted and morphed into the evil Empire we know today, via the mechanism of atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The imperial story has always been that the bombs fell because island-to-island fighting all the way to Japan would cost too many American military lives. There’s a grain of truth in that lie, like all the best lies we are taught.

At a bare raw minimum, it means that in the eyes of the Truman Administration, the life of one uniformed American serviceman was worth two or four or eight times more than the life of any Japanese civilian that got melted into puddles those two days–women, the young, the old, the infirm; whoever–the completely innocent and the arguably complicit alike.

This is the very calculus of evil itself, and anyone who wants you to take it as an article of mathematical faith is by definition playing for Team Satan. But, it gets worse.

According to one theory (I believe I learned it from Oliver Stone), the US in committing the atrocities wasn’t even doing it, primarily, to save some white lives at the expense of other yellower ones. They were doing it to save time, instead.

In Germany the race to Berlin between the Russians and the Yanks essentially ended in a tie, and they split the city.

But without the A-bombs, the race to Tokyo would have ended in a decisive Russian victory while the Americans were still carving their way through some jungle far to the south.

The bombs fell, according to this theory, because Truman needed Japan to surrender to him, and not Stalin. The price of that strategic victory in the very earliest days of the Cold War amounted to a couple hundred thousand civilians of the Jap persuasion. The cost of getting a leg up on the Russians was precisely a calculated genocide, along with the loss of the American soul and moral high ground unhappily ever after.

Anyway. Back to Gramps the smug self-satisfied toad.

He was only a child when the Japanese children melted into their sidewalks. He was probably every bit as innocent as they, but he had the advantage of being alive, and that was only the beginning of his blessings. His Empire had the whole rest of the world by the economic balls, and they built him a free public school where he could be taught that the Empire was always right–in Japan, in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Ukraine–at every turn of the military-industrial screw, he was on the right side of God’s plan, because in every case the real enemy was the horror of Communism, and very particularly the Communists that spoke in Russian.

When he got out of school, he got a great job supporting the right side, and it bought him a boat, and a summer cabin. His beliefs and allegiances put his two daughters through college for next to nothing. They bought him the very real Murican dream life.

He told himself loudly, and anyone else who would listen, that he was a good hardworking self-made man.

Meanwhile, for the generation that came after him, and the one after that and the one after that, the exact same Imperial system made it harder and harder and harder to be so blessed by the Sky Man with the fluffy white beard. The great jobs went away in most places, and the ones that were still there required ever more moral sacrifice, ever more turning of a blind eye to what was really going on.

The free public schools turned into less pretty camps where, yes, the kids still learned to read the King’s English and do their sums, sometimes, but also to be fully indoctrinated in all the ways We were, and continue to be, Always Right. In the richer suburbs to which the fortunate fled, it was always warm and bright, but as time went on, the camps in the rural and urban hinterlands got cold, got rats, and slowly started to crumble in both the physical and moral sense.

For average people and even just generally, life got more and more ugly and poor and bereft of value. We got franchises. We got smart phones. We got punked with trinkets like wide-eyed natives. Shit. What can you do? Vote blue maybe? MAGA it up?

The real money got sucked up higher and higher into the social strata, and most essentially of all it went to fighting endless wars all over the planet in the name of all that was good and holy–namely ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ and whipping the atheist Ruskies bloody, and … Profit. Profit, the goodest of goods, the holiest of holies.

It all ran on oil and the more we burned the hotter things got. The glaciers melted first. The icebergs went after. We sent scraps of money to save the poor drowning polar bears, and we went to the post office to send it in a GMC Yukon, because as goes General Motors, so goes America.

Gramps the Toad watched it all on a widescreen color TV and a little one he carried in his pocket these days.

What did he think about it all?

He blamed the millennial grandchildren, for their lack of character, for their needing a safe space, from time to time, to protect them from the horror show of a world he and his generation built. In the greatest country. With no health care, still … still, no health care as a human right!

I curse you Gramps. Not just because you’re an idiot, but because You’re choosing to be a fuckin’ asshole too.

You’re not going to have to live in the full hellscape you helped build at the expense of future generations.

You won’t live to see the evil Russians and the inscrutable Chinese take over your world before it burns, and they absolutely will. It’s already happening.

Keep telling yourself how admirably blameless you are and always have been. Keep blaming the confused poor kids for everything that’s wrong in your otherwise perfect dreamy life.

The bad guys are going to win, just like you and your bad guys did once upon a time.

The last sound you hear will be chickens, clucking home to a sorry roost that makes no one happy.