How to Be an Elder in a Time Like This

If you have been paying any attention to the protests in Minneapolis, you have probably noticed something easy to miss but hard to forget: so many of those in the streets are young adults. Yes, there are more older bodies than one might expect—people like me, grateful and a little stiff—but the great current of these peacemakers is roughly the age of my children. They arrive with cardboard signs and open faces, with a courage that has not yet learned the language of resignation. They see with eyes not yet fully trained to accept the world as it is. They cannot quite say, “We’ve always done it this way,” or “We tried that once and it didn’t work,” and because of that, they still know—deep in their bones—that history is unfinished and that the future is not yet sealed.

This has always been so. Again and again, when a society grows too accustomed to its own compromises, the young become its conscience. It was young people who sat at segregated lunch counters, who rode buses into danger, who marched in Birmingham, who filled the streets during the Vietnam War, who helped awaken the modern environmental movement, who refused silence during the AIDS crisis, who stood up after Parkland, and who continue to insist—again and again—that dignity, safety, and belonging are not privileges but birthrights. They rise because they have more to gain—their whole lives stretch out before them—and because they have less to lose, not yet fully invested in the careful furniture of existing power.

And this courage is not confined to our own borders. Even now, in Iran, young people—led in such a courageous and visible way by young women—walk into their own streets knowing the cost may be imprisonment or death, simply to claim the most elemental human freedoms: to live, to choose, to breathe without fear. Their bravery should slow us down. It should return us to reverence. It should remind us that history is not something that merely happens to us, but something that is being written, line by line, by ordinary bodies willing to stand where love and truth require.

So to my older friends, I want to say this as gently as I can: listen. Listen not to correct, not to manage, not to translate their hope into your own familiar categories, but to be changed. Their wisdom does not come wrapped in certainty, but in a deeper remembering—of what we once knew and what we have gradually learned to forget.

And to all the mansplainers out there: please, please resist the temptation to offer an unsolicited explanation about someone else’s future. Sometimes the most faithful thing an elder can do is to become quiet enough to recognize that a new and necessary wisdom is already learning how to speak.