It comes as no surprise to informed insiders (and, let’s face it, everyone else in Canada who was just speculating blindly) that Justin Trudeau is announcing his candidacy for leader of the federal Liberal Party today.

This question is, is he ready? He’s only forty years old.

Well, as it turns out, I have an answer to that pressing question. And the answer is, “Fuck you.”

Exactly how old do you have to be these days to not be treated like an infant? Who decided the world needs to be run by a bunch of supposedly learned geriatrics who consider anyone not wearing adult diapers to be a silly child, unready and unprepared to step onto the world stage? Like these wizened elders have done such a great job running the planet. Last I checked, they’ve fucked up pretty much everything.

Let me do some fact checking and tally the numbers again. Yup, everything. Well and truly fucked. Good work, you old bastards.

It wasn’t always like this. In older, better days, life didn’t begin at forty. It ended.

You don’t have to go too far back in history to find a time when forty was your life expectancy. If you made it past that, you were living on borrowed time. And if you were going to get anything done, you had to move your ass and get to it. I don’t just mean starting a family. I’m talking about nation building. Back in the day, kids would routinely ascend to the throne in their teen years and be put in charge of entire empires. Alexander the Great spent a decade conquering the entire known world and was done and dead at thirty-two. These days, Alexander the Third of Macedonia would be stuck serving mochaccinos at Second Cup, hoping his Baby Boomer boss would hurry the fuck up and retire so he could get a promotion.

Yes, I blame the Baby Boomers or, as I call them, The Worst Generation. It’s all their fault. It always is. I come from the generation behind them, the X-ers, and living in their wake has involved eating lots of shit. They did all the fun drugs in the ‘60s, we got the “Just Say No” campaign. They fucked everything that moved in the ‘70s, we got AIDS paranoia to sexually terrorize us out of getting it on. In the ‘80s, they made boatloads of money, while today we get to live our peak earning years in a depression with mountains of student debt and 0% interest rates that make saving money fruitless. Come the ‘90s, they were still holding on to their sweet high-paying careers while the rest of us were wasting the energy of youth slogging away in the same entry-level positions we’d been holding for years. Come the new century, they finally started to collect their fat government pensions. By the time they finally die off, that fund will have been tapped dry, leaving us to live off our own savings that will still be drawing 0% interest if the Boomer-run central banks have their way.

So yeah, if a forty-year-young kid wants to step up and make a bid for the top job, good luck to him. I hope he smokes the grey-haired competition by using every advantage available to him. Not just the Trudeau dynasty name, but the vast youthful power of the Intranets, with its series of tubes, and The Twitter, and the Book of Faces, and The Google. May he employ such technology to run rings around the old farts while they’re still looking for their StairMaster’s “on” button.