Boomers, Step Aside.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged - Viewpoint essay

Apiculturists have answered that famous Hamlet multiple-choice, existential question:

1. to be

2. not to be.

The answer is b, not to be.

On the West Coast, 60 percent of the bee colonies have gone missing. On the overachieving East Coast, 70 percent are has bee-ns. This latest plague upon the land is called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

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CCD "occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs, and a few immature workers," says the London Independent . Sounds like a planning meeting I once attended for a gay protest at the annual White House Easter celebration.

Apian scientists posit many causes for the deaths of the bees: mites, pesticides, radioactive waves, cell phones, genetically altered foods, global warming, or all of the above. I think it's Starbucks in the groundwater. Absorbed by plants, the caffeine makes the bees busy-busy, then crazy-busy, then dead from overwork. No more little bees' knees jutting from peonies, obscenely pantalooned in pollen.

Albert Einstein, one Alberto we can believe, said that after the bees disappear, humanity has about four years left. I don't want to sound like some Nostra Dame, but we have already begun to see a corollary collapse. It is BBCC, Baby Boomer Colony Collapse. Quite frankly, I couldn't be happier. And I am one.

My Baby Boom generation has been endlessly, tediously fascinating to itself. Spawn of World War II, we grew up on Spocks. We rocked from Elvis to the Beatles. The Vietnam War was our first quagmire. We did drugs, inhaled, fought for civil rights for women, blacks, and gays. Love meant never having to say you're sorry. Our idealism was supposedly killed with Martin Luther King and the Kennedys.

Some late boomers got conservative, corporate...