We need to be honest with ourselves before we ask anything of anyone else.
As we got older, many of us loosened our grip. Not because we stopped caring—but because that’s what age does. Life accumulates weight. You work. You raise families. You absorb loss. You learn which battles drain you dry and which ones can wait. Somewhere along the way, without making a formal decision, you step back and tell yourself the next generation will take it from here.
That isn’t cowardice.
That’s fatigue.
Every generation does this. No exceptions.
But fatigue is not the same thing as weakness. And stepping back is not the same thing as surrender.
What people forget is that experience does not disappear when it goes quiet. It waits. Courage doesn’t vanish—it rests. Strength doesn’t erode—it just stops being exercised until something serious demands it again.
This moment demands it.
There are roughly seventy million Baby Boomers alive in this country today. That number is not sentimental. It is structural. It is enough people to slow bad laws, stall reckless systems, and force accountability where none currently exists. It is enough people—if aligned—to change the course of a river that has started moving too fast to see its own banks.
And we know rivers.
We’ve crossed them before.
We carry scars. Some visible. Most not.
Those scars came from factories, offices, farms, and shop floors. From layoffs that arrived without warning. From wars declared by people who never had to fight them. From recessions that hollowed out towns. From strikes, protests, compromises, and long nights deciding whether to keep going or walk away.
Those scars are not defects.
They are proof that we bore load.
We sustained this country through oil shocks, inflation, political scandal, institutional failure, and social fracture. We learned—often the hard way—that systems don’t survive on ideals alone. They survive on rules, maintenance, and people who stay when the excitement fades.
We helped build the foundations of what exists today knowing full well that others would build on top of them.
That was always part of the bargain.
But here is where the line gets drawn.
A foundation is meant to support a structure—not be ignored by it.
It is meant to anchor growth—not justify recklessness.
And it is meant to be respected by those who build above it.
What we are seeing now is not careful construction. It is speed for its own sake. Weight stacked on weight, decision piled on decision, all justified by urgency, competitiveness, and the claim that this is “inevitable.”
Anyone who has ever worked a job that mattered knows how that ends.
First come the cracks.
Then the stress fractures.
Then the failure no one wants to own.
We are not against building upward.
We are against building without regard for load.
We are not afraid of technology.
We are wary of amnesia—the kind that forgets why guardrails exist, why labor protections were written, why oversight had to be fought for instead of assumed.
Those protections were not gifts. They were responses to damage. They were written because people like us lived through what happens when power moves faster than accountability.
That’s why this moment feels familiar in our bones.
We recognize the pattern.
We remember the cost.
And we know that once systems harden, changing them becomes far more painful than slowing them down early.
Here is the truth that needs to be said plainly:
Younger generations feel what is happening, but they do not yet have the leverage to stop it. They are fragmented. Overworked. Economically boxed in. They lack the voting density, institutional memory, and collective confidence to apply sustained pressure on their own.
We do not.
Boomers still vote.
Boomers still donate.
Boomers still attend town halls.
Boomers still write letters that get read.
Boomers still swing districts.
And most importantly—boomers know how to stay in the fight after the cameras leave.
This is not a call to rage. Rage burns out.
This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia distracts.
This is a call to stewardship.
Yes, we dropped the ball in places. Every generation does. Some fights we stepped away from too soon. Some systems we trusted longer than we should have. Some warnings we ignored because we were tired.
That doesn’t erase what we still carry.
Judgment.
Memory.
Tenacity.
We know the difference between progress and recklessness because we’ve lived through both. We know that speed without consent destabilizes. We know that automation without accountability erodes trust. And we know that replacement without explanation fractures the social contract that took generations to build.
Congress will not slow this on its own.
Corporations will not volunteer restraint.
Markets will not ask permission.
They respond to pressure.
And pressure, in a democracy, comes from people who show up calmly, consistently, and refuse to be distracted while the real decisions are made quietly.
This is not about stopping the future.
It is about making sure humans arrive intact.
One more duty.
One more course correction.
One more time stepping forward—not in anger, not in panic—but with the quiet strength of people who have already carried the weight once and know how to carry it again.
We didn’t come this far to watch the foundation be buried under speed.
We didn’t endure all of that to see what we built treated as expendable scaffolding.
Seventy million people is enough to reverse the direction of a river—if we step into it together and push with purpose.
This is not fear.
This is responsibility.
And it is not over yet.
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
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