Opinion: Environmentalist/author Bill McKibben says older ‘experienced Americans’ are going for El-Sayed, Lawrence
It seems likely that both Tom Barrett and Mike Rogers are counting on older voters to save their political careers in next month’s election—after all, their opponents in the House and Senate races are much younger.
I think that’s unwise of them, though: many of us “experienced Americans” will be descending on the Lansing area in the remaining weeks of the campaign to knock doors for their opponents, Will Lawrence and Abdul El-Sayed. Both those young men have earned the backing of Third Act, one of the country’s largest collections of politically active seniors.
Why are we older voters not just voting for Lawrence and El-Sayed but volunteering for them? Partly it’s self-interest. We know who will stand up for Social Security and Medicare, and who will sabotage it. If Barrett is returned to D.C., the very first vote he’ll cast will be to re-elect Mike Johnson Speaker of the House. For many years Republicans have tried to privatize or reduce these programs; now Johnson has said that they need to be “adjusted.”
Rogers has slavishly followed Trump on one issue after another, even journeying off to Dallas for the president’s midterm “convention” last month—and as Trump told what he thought was a private meeting earlier this year, “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Instead, he said, “we have to take care of one thing: military protection.” Obviously, Trump and the GOP war supporters have done a bad job of that. Our war in Iran has mostly meant higher gas prices. But trading off national security against Social Security is just wrong; previous presidents have delivered both.
But it’s not just our own interests we care about. We have kids and grandkids, and we know how financially stressed they are, sometimes even avoiding the doctor when they’re sick for fear of the bill. Medicare works well for us, delivering quality health care more cheaply than for-profit insurers. Why not, as Dr. El-Sayed has pointed out, let our families into these programs as well, and reduce the overall cost of American health care?
We worry too about the other problems our kids will face, the planet’s rising temperature, for instance. In Michigan, as in so many other places, proposals for new data centers, usually powered by filthy fossil fuel turbines, keep popping up. Mike Rogers was all for them—he told one group that communities would like them more than new schools or fire stations—until public opinion turned. He flipped with it, calling for a one-year moratorium, but this is the kind of issue where we need a steady nerve to stand up to the oligarchs.
That’s precisely what Will Lawrence demonstrated in his years fighting for infrastructure legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act was very much a byproduct of his work with the Sunrise Movement, and it was beginning to help Michigan with the transition to electric vehicles. Until, of course, the GOP House and Senate stripped it all away, at the behest of the oil barons. Michigan engineering should be at the forefront of the transition to clean energy. Instead, Trump and his Congressional coterie have stood by and watched the action head to China. Many of us are old enough to remember that the first solar cell was invented in the U.S. in 1954, and that our country built the first industrial wind turbine in 1943. But now all that is going to make another country prosperous.
Unless, of course, we get some new leadership. Older people understand that the time has come to pass the baton to some younger hands. We watch a declining president Trump and know that the time has come for fresher approaches in Washington. So, we’ll be out knocking on doors. If you see a few wrinkles and bit of gray hair on your stoop, answer the bell and see what we have to say. It might surprise you!
Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which has 125,000 members across the country. He is the author of 21 books, most recently “Here Comes the Sun.”
