Kids these days.  I’m hearing a lot of griping about how their parents screwed up the world.  Global warming, wealth inequality, mass shootings, student debt and so forth.  This sort of stunning ingratitude is all too common amongst the younger generations.  They don’t appear to realize how the older generations made the world better, and spend all of their time on focusing entirely on the mistakes the older generations made.

When older people call them on this, the slightly snippy reply from from these young adults is “OK, Boomer.”  Which loosely translates as “shut up, person who screwed up the world.” This is applied broadly to any generation older than the Millennials, not just Boomers.  But is it truly fair to treat Boomers like they screwed up the world? Let’s think about the things Boomers and the Silent Generation did, with an occasional assist from Gen-Xers.

One that even the most hardcore woke Millennial would have to acknowledge are the advances in Civil Rights and Women’s rights produced by the Boomers.  They were in the streets for the rights of minorities. They pushed back against Jim Crow and redlining. They demanded equal rights for women. And they succeeded.  There were a few things they didn’t get, like free abortions on demand or slave reparations. But perhaps that’s because those would have been a bridge too far. Regardless, the generation of the Millennial’s parents and grandparents advanced the cause of liberty in a manner more extraordinary than perhaps any generation before it.

Nerdier members of those generations advanced mass communications.  This may not seem super sexy, but think for a second. In previous generations and centuries, things could happen halfway around the world and you might never hear about it.  Or at least not hear about it for months. But when reporters could file stories that hit print or nightly news within days or hours, the response became more rapid. When Boomers heard about atrocities in Vietnam or starvation in Ethiopia, they could take timely action.

Speaking of timely news, the world was sort of blown away when they watched a couple of guys land on the moon in 1969.  The older generations did that. And the entire world witnessed it. And the guys who did it did so in peace and on behalf of all mankind and left a memorial to all astronauts and cosmonauts who died getting into space.

And let’s not forget what may be the greatest achievement of the second half of the 20th century: the defeat of communism.  After the fall of the Berlin wall in the late eighties and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, millions of people across the world were uplifted from poverty and oppression.  Some of those countries are truly free countries now. Others are at least more free than they were. This was one of the pivotal moments in the 20th century and probably all of human history. Your parents and grandparents did this, young people.

This may be why there was Crazy, Ridiculous Economic Growth.  It started before the end of the Cold War, but most of it happened after that.  75% of the wealth of the United States has been produced in the past fifty years.  Years where our own record on freedom and equality was better than it had ever been.  Years where the oppression of older, oppressive ideologies (such as fascism, communism, and colonialism) were on the decline.  Freedom and equal rights appears to have finally produced results. Lots of old white men theorized about it in the late 18th century, and the older generations appear to have realized it better than anyone else.

Some of their advances occurred in mundane but important ways.  Like food and medicine. The Boomers made advances in medicine and food production that ended disease and hunger not just in America, but in distant places around the world.  One early boomer meme before the Internet was even a thing was “there are hungry kids in China”. My parents told me that when I refused to clean my plate. But that’s not a thing anymore, because of the actions of their generation.

And there’s one other little thing.  Computers and the Internet. The Boomers made your computers and video games and consoles and websites possible, although some of that was done by my own GenX generation.  You couldn’t even throw down your little #OkBoomer memes if they hadn’t made that possible.

Despite all of this, there are a number of things that  young people endlessly scream about. We hear endless complaints about mass shootings, despite a long term decline in mass shootings and violence in general.  We hear endless screams for socialism and communism, even though the literal opposite of that is what made the world great.

One of the most confusing complaints is in regards to global warming.  Yes, the world is warming. Yes, the cause is primarily human made. But have you given any thought as to why?  The global population has roughly doubled over the past forty years. In 1972, it was 3.85 billion, half of what it is today.  When the population was half of that, it was sometime in the early 20th century. It was half of that shortly before the end of the 18th century.  And it was half of that roughly 150 years earlier and half of that about 700 years earlier and half of that 1800 years earlier.   It used to take centuries to double the population, now it takes decades.  And this is not a simple geometric increase, it’s a sudden, meteoric rise.

This is because the Boomers made food and medicine available.  The consequence is that the human population expanded suddenly, requiring more energy.  The energy sources required to support this population produced emissions, warming the earth.  The Boomers dropped the ball on this. They could have done better. But this happened primarily because they wanted food and medicine (especially vaccines, the most important of all medical advances) spread around the world.  Hardly evidence of ill intent. This problem was caused by them solving other problems. Unintended consequences are a thing for every generation.

Here’s something you need to know if you don’t already: Your parents were right about just about everything.  After years of fighting with my parents as a teenager, it slowly dawned on me in my mid-twenties (after I’d moved out, finished college, and started paying my own way for a few years) that they had been right in almost every one of those arguments.  There are a few things my parents might have been wrong about (LGBT rights, global warming, whether or not superhero movies are good), but for the most part, they got it right. Because they learned the lessons from their parents, which were passed down from their parents, and so on.  The lessons of our ancestors are not irrelevant.  Some truths are timeless.

Truth is your parents and grandparents (with an assist from your older cousins, brothers, and sisters, the Gen Xers) made the world better than it has ever been.  They solved millions of problems. They also caused thousands of new ones. So it goes for every generation. They did way more good than bad. So acknowledge that, and don’t waste your time griping about the things they missed.  Instead, spend your time fixing the things they missed. And remember this when you have this same conversation with your children and grandchildren.