• Gen Zers are apparently picking up on Donald Trump’s lewd “Get ’em” comments that came to light in 2016.
• This might make you feel absolutely ancient, but resist the urge to roll over.
• We should be glad that young people have TikTok to help them learn about… history.

Do you want to feel old? Some Gen Zers seem to be just now finding out of Donald Trump The infamous “Grab em…” comments that came during a hot mic moment.

The clip, which became an issue in the 2016 election, has resurfaced on TikTok, where some teens and 20-somethings are hearing it for the first time, The Washington Post rEPORTS.

Older readers, prepare to crumble:

“I don’t think any of my friends have heard it,” said Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old college student from Ohio, who heard the tape for the first time on her TikTok For You feed this week. “We were all equally shocked.”

The recording, which was caught on tape in 2005, came to light in 2016. It was made when Trump was having an off-camera conversation with “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush.

Note that the Gen Z who first heard the recording would have been children in 2016. An 18-year-old voting for the first time next week would have been in the fourth or fifth grade when Trump was first elected. You can imagine why they might have been shielded from the harsh language of the actual clip when it first broke.

This week, I saw a tweet that went viral from someone who was surprised to learn about how the results of the 2000 presidential race took so long and were so disputed. This was huge news at the time, but of course different news larger event took place in 2001 that changed the political agenda of the next decade, sending the year 2000 and its trappings down the memory hole.

In the recent fervor around The Washington Post’s decision not to issue a presidential opinionI read the decision of its editors from 1988 not to support any of the candidates. I was in second grade, and my awareness of the political landscape was mainly through Dana Carvey’s Bush Sr. impersonation. In the 1988 op-ed, I was struck by the description of these really substantial political arguments about taxes and foreign policy that have faded from modern relevance.

As older millennials like me enter their 40s, moments like this happen all the time: reminders that us it’s the old crazy fogies now. We are no longer the youth leading the mainstream culture, and the moments and events that felt so important to us are now either long forgotten or, even worse, shudder. (Please, let’s agree to never tell Gen Z about “left shark“.)

I know the knee-jerk instinct is to think how this makes us feel old (we are, after all, self-obsessed millennials) and scoff at these ignoramuses. YOUTH who do not know their very recent history.

But leave that aside. We should be glad that children these days they have the technological access and the tools to learn about these things. The fact that many young people are learning about the 2016 election is a good thing — even if they only get it because Billie Eilish posted the clip on TikTok. Great! i want more! I want young people to know all about these things – an informed electorate is ideal and who cares if this information comes in the form of a TikTok?

We should feel happy that Gen Z is informed and grateful for information about news events and cultural moments that actually make it into the collective national memory. Don’t let this make you feel old; let it make you wiser.