One of the things I most love about writing on my blog is that I have an opportunity to express myself freely, and I know I will get in trouble regularly for what I write.

It is a gift to be challenged and to defend my ideas. And it’s a good thing because it happens almost every day.

I wrote somewhat admiringly the other day about the teens on TikTok, who seemed to have blown a big hole in President Trump’s ego in Tulsa the other night.

This is something the Democratic Party and countless people who claim to be progressives have not been able to do in four years. I admit I got a big kick out of it. I found myself rooting for them every step of the way.

I am a member of TikTok, I should say, but don’t travel in the right circles. I knew nothing of this plot, carried out with the skill and discipline of a Navy Seal’s commando raid.

Thousands of teenagers ordered hundreds of thousands of tickets to the President’s catastrophic opening rally in Tulsa the other night. Only 6,200 people show up in an arena that seats 20,000.

Although embarrassed Trump campaign officials vehemently denied it, the TikTokers apparently got Trump and his campaign to brag about the million calls they got for tickets. The arena was only one-third full.

What TikTok did was important. In the most creative and bold way, they just re-defined protest, and in a non-violent and disciplined way. Thanks to you people, you created the first bright and creative spot in an ever dreary and dispiriting political season.

There are about 500,000 people, mostly younger people, on Tik Tok.

I have to admit, I admire the spirit and energy and cleverness of these children and young adults.

Of course,  the people I rudely call Old Farts were like hornets in a fallen nest.

How could I justify this? Why wasn’t I outraged? Why didn’t their teachers or parents teach them right and wrong?

What hypocrites we are. We have created a world overwhelmed by right and wrong, greed and cruelty, hypocrisy and denial, racism, and indifference to immigrants and the poor?

Our planet has been poisoned by us and our greed and ignorance, our society tarred by endemic racism so pervasive it’s hard to see.

Have we created a country and a world so moral we can lecture other people about it?

And we dare to scold them for not being as moral as we are? It’s a wonder any of them speak to any of us at all. Why on earth should they respect a government that yawns at racism, pollutes their future, and saddles them with debt for learning?

I got a slew of angry messages – most of them pompous –  huffing and puffing about kids today, and how they needed to behave, to curb their rebellious and be more like the good old days, when all children were angels, listened to their teachers, were punished by their parents, went outside to play, helped old people across the street and didn’t sit in their houses all day, plotting, scheming and conniving on their devices.

In the old days, a bunch of teenaged geeks would never have pranked a windbag President; Congress spent most of its time hunting down communists and keeping them from writing movie scripts. They’re even worse now.

I am in something of the silent majority on this issue.

Few people speak well of kids these days and the ones who know better mostly stay quiet. Our President wants nothing to do with children or their culture; he has spoken poorly of young people, citing their disrespect for authority.

And why I wonder, should kids today respect us and our authority. Our President and his political party have looked the other way while children are slaughtered in their classrooms so they can keep taking money from corporate gun companies.

In 2019, eight people were killed and 43 injured in 25 shooting incidents related to schools. Congress is complicit. The wonder if they talk to us at all.

On their own hook, and our of our sight, they have created the most vibrant, creative, and exciting culture in the history of human children. The TikTok stunt – they didn’t steal anybody’s identity or send death threats – shown more imagination and spirit than the Democratic Party has mustered in four years.

I dread Old Fartism more than almost anything I can think of. I see it as the first hardening of the arteries, the death of the spirit, the first death. I remember all the clucking about rock and roll, how it damaged brains and spawned immorality.

Every generation does this, calls up the old days, the old values and clucks about kids today. Nostalgia is a trap, a place to hide from the present and the future. I don’t ever go there.

I don’t know all the kids on TikTok, but I’ve been writing about kids and their culture and following it for a long time, starting at my time at Wired and Rolling Stone.

I think kids today are amazing. They surpass anything I ever attempted or can do now. Their gaming world is  a profoundly rich and transformative culture.

They were tickled to go after President Trump because he has been deriding and ridiculing their culture for most of his life and all of his presidency. He sure started it.

Their biggest problem is that most of their teachers and parents have no idea what they are doing with their culture or how they do it. The Internet has broken open the monopoly adults once had on the culture of the young, and on controlling their minds.

I do remember this as a kid – comics and rock n’ roll and Saturday morning comics were it for me and my culture, my only choices until my father shut down my rock and roll because he thought Buddy Holly and Elvis were dangerous and of poor morals.

I’ve been threatened and scammed and hacked more times than I can count, and I don’t like it.

But it’s fatuous to equate what these kids did with the trolls running wild on social media.

Congress, a favored nesting place of Old Farts, is utterly ignorant of the tools and scale of youth culture. Young people have no respect for our leaders or the wrong and corrupt way they conduct themselves. And why should they respect people who line their own pockets and fatten up their friends?

TikTok is more creative than any newspaper, magazine, or TV show I’ve seen adults produce.

People there know climate change is real, and that they will suffer for our laziness and neglect.

They are tolerant of one another, and people of different colors and identities. They have their own voices and styles, and those are appreciated and celebrated, not criticized, and slandered.

They are fiercely opposed to racism.

And these young people are inventive. I am proud to have celebrated their energy and creativity.  I do it whenever I can. I see Old Fartism as a disease I need to fight almost every day of my life.

These children owe us nothing; we have failed them in almost every conceivable way. They owe themselves a better life than we left for them.

And listen: I was one of the children of the old days, and I can testify with heart and soul that they weren’t so good. Young people today are so much more alive and creative and engaged with their world than me and the children around me ever were.

What people don’t like about them and fear about them is that they can’t be controlled in the way children have always been controlled. They are free in a way most children could not even imagine. That is frightening to a lot of people.

That’s where Old Fartism comes from.

For me, culture was being locked in my bedroom with my father’s Playboy magazine and some worn Batman comics.

I didn’t know there were ever slaves in America until I read a book about it outside of my Junior High School Curriculum.  I had no idea many millions of women were as unhappy as my mother for being pushed into their housewive roles until I was in my 20’s.

It was not a Golden Age of happy, moral and well-grounded children.

When my father wasn’t home, I took my portable radio from its hiding place and listened to Buddy Holly and Elvis. That was the outer boundary of the good old days.

I would have given my right arm to have a TikTok to explore and create on. The funny thing is that I’m on it now, an Old Fart who happily rejects Old Fartism.

To Old Fartism, I say “nuts to you.” Embrace the future.

I have no illusions about it. I can never be one of them and don’t try, but my heart sings and soul jumps just by looking at what they do.