The memes of Kim-Jong Un on Facebook are endless. He is portrayed as a tiny, immature, babbling buffoon with limited resources and technology to back up his recent belligerent threats of nuclear war against the United States and neighboring South Korea.

My question is merely one of whether or not we should be taking these threats and this young ruler more seriously. A lot of Americans seem comforted by the media reports that North Korea’s missile technology is lacking in ability to reach American shores. They seem to think, and joke, that this ruler isn’t really a threat to us. Our government seems exasperated in dealing with the country that’s so closed off from the rest of the world.

“Our retaliatory action will start without any notice from now,” Pyongyang’s official news agency KCNA said in a statement about South Korea, published Apr.16.

It’s kind of disturbing, honestly. We don’t know much about this young dictator, who is running a country that we barely have a cease-fire treaty with, and is making open threats against us and neighboring countries. We can’t be sure his motives are merely blackmail, we can’t be sure this is pure rhetoric or an actual concern; regardless of what it is, it’s no laughing matter.

Even a small-scale attack on North Korea’s neighboring countries in Asia would be catastrophic, and could likely launch the world into a third world war. At the least, it could thrust our country into another war we can’t afford.

“The United States has made clear many times what the conditions are for our entering talks, and they haven’t changed,” Kerry said in an interview with CNN’s Jill Dougherty in Tokyo.

“The conditions have to be met where the North has to move towards denuclearization, indicate a seriousness in doing so by reducing these threats, stop the testing and indicate it’s actually prepared to negotiate,” he said.

I think it’s time to stop cracking jokes, and start taking this seriously. It’s not going to be as funny when we’re all nuked into oblivion and won’t have skin, or Facebook to post memes on.