Opinion | Older Americans Fight to Make America Better – The New York Times

Source: Opinion | Older Americans Fight to Make America Better – The New York Times

By Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood

Mr. McKibben is the founder of Third Act, helped found the climate advocacy group 350.org and is the author of the forthcoming memoir “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon.” Ms. Windwood is the lead adviser of Third Act and a co-author of the forthcoming “Leading With Joy.”

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell did more than go after Spotify for spreading Covid disinformation last week. They also, inadvertently, signaled what could turn out to be an extraordinarily important revival: of an older generation fully rejoining the fight for a working future.

You could call it (with a wink!) codger power.

We’ve seen this close up: Over the past few months, we’ve worked with others of our generation to start the group Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change. That’s no easy task. The baby boomers and the Silent Generation before them make up a huge share of the population — nearly 75 million people, a larger population than France’s. And conventional wisdom (and a certain amount of data) holds that people become more conservative as they age, perhaps because they have more to protect.

But as those musicians reminded us, these are no normal generations. We’re both in our 60s; in the 1960s and ’70s, our generation either bore witness to or participated in truly profound cultural, social and political transformations. Think of Neil Young singing “four dead in Ohio” in the weeks after Kent State or Joni Mitchell singing “they paved paradise” after the first Earth Day. Perhaps we thought we’d won those fights. But now we emerge into older age with skills, resources, grandchildren — and a growing fear that we’re about to leave the world a worse place than we found it. So some of us are more than ready to turn things around.