“Elderly White Hippies”

On August 20, 2025, White House factotum Stephen Miller railed against demonstrators opposing the occupation of Washington, D.C., calling them “stupid white hippies” and saying the regime was going to ignore them. Failing in that resolve, he elaborated, “All these demonstrators you’ve seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they’re not part of the city and never have been. And by the way, most of the citizens who live in Washington, D.C., are Black.”

Ah! So that’s why he was crashing out about the protestors: they were white. If they had been Black, out there in the streets, he could have gotten the violence he longed for. But elderly white hippies, “that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old”? His hands were tied and he hated it.

This is useful information. The usual protest tactics, we learn, are old school. What makes the regime lose its mind is ELDERLY WHITE HIPPIES!

This is our moment!

But … what now? How do we make the most of this?

*****

I’ve been having an extended email discussion with a friend about how to solve all the problems we are facing. I call it our “late night grad student sessions,” the kind where you sit around until all hours flexing your brain in the company of others who are flexing theirs.

I remember such sessions over coffee in the department office, out on the quad with lunch, or downstairs in the grad lounge. We talked theory, interpretation, philosophy, and morality. We took issue with our professors or the textbooks or pompous upper level students. It was all as it was supposed to be. We were relatively young, more mature than undergrads but not yet out in the world. We were still deciding what we wanted to be when we grew up and how we wanted to be, based on values and ambitions we were still exploring.

When I thought about my metaphor, though, I began to have some doubts. Shouldn’t we now, at this age, after decades of adulthood, have a pretty clear idea of who we are? Is it responsible, in this time of crisis, to be acting as though we have the luxury of long conversations about issues we really should have thought through by this time? 

Fair question. 

But …

After all those decades of “middle life,” we are now entering that least celebrated of life stages, the wisdom years. It’s a tough stage. There is a lot of pressure to be simultaneously blamed (social media agrees that Boomers are responsible for everything) and irrelevant: we should be “home, taking a nap.”

Here’s the thing, though: if we are home taking a nap, we can’t be making Good Trouble.

*****

There is no user manual for moving into the Wisdom Years. No one tells you how to make the most of them, that they are not just about engaging people who now have time on their hands. So we have to figure it out for ourselves, that now is the time for harnessing our experience, our triumphs and wounds, our personalities and convictions for the greater good, for the future. Anyone who wants us staying home is actually afraid of our power.

We aren’t just fading away. We are shifting into a new gear.

It’s not a simple transition, though. It is way too easy to keep doing things the same way, on automatic pilot, not even realizing what is happening. We have our survival strategies, after all, the best way to do things, the ideas to keep pushing and the ones to avoid. The young people roll their eyes, laugh at our ages-old slang words, our blocks against technology, or current music, or cultural references.

For years we could get along with a comfortable generation gap but we can no longer afford to waste anyone’s talents. In this state of emergency, it’s all hands on deck. We need every idea, every experience, every adaptation to new reality. So this life transition, the one to the third stage of life, is not so much about who we are going to be, which is what you get to figure out at a younger age, but who we are willing to be now. Are we willing to continue to learn, to change, to integrate new information, to be what the young people need to see?

Are we willing to imagine something that does not yet exist? The young people might not be able to see it, yet, but we could. We have seen change in our lives and some of it we had a hand in bringing about. It began with believing something had gone wrong and that it could be fixed. In spite of the cynicism we have also acquired over the years, that belief is still in us.

What can you imagine that does not yet exist?

What I imagine is an America in which “we, the people” means everyone, no exceptions, no hierarchy, no “us” and “them.” That America does not exist now and it never did. But it could.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of white men had a radical idea, one that at that time did not exist. So they imagined it and created it and we have been living in that creation ever since. All of us have been living in that creation ever since.

When the framers said “we, the people,” though, they never meant everybody. “People” meant landed white men. Only. Even today, even after the document has been amended to broaden its protections, it still, at its core, means white men of property. All other groups have had to fight, often bitterly and against both vicious and polite opposition, to be fully a part of “we, the people.” Those fights are on-going and can be set back any time evil white men take power. This is not just a flaw in the original system, it is a weakness, possibly–the jury is still out on this–a fatal one.

So if we are going to rebuild—and humans always rebuild—we have to imagine something as radical as was imagined 250 years ago. This time, though, if we are going to survive another 250 years, when we say “we, the people” we have to mean it.

All of which is to say, get out there, all you elderly white hippies. If we can be Stephen Miller’s kryptonite, we can do anything!