Retired, Not Done

AS A FEDERAL WORKER, Peter Goering was never told he couldn’t participate in social activism, but the message was clear: “We didn’t have any explicit prohibitions from participating in civil disobedience actions,” Goering said. “But an arrest here or there may have caught up with me.”

Things changed for Goering with his December 2023 retirement from the Food and Drug Administration, where he worked on medical product safety. Two weeks after he left his job, he was arrested in a civil disobedience action—his first ever—protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza. Since his retirement, Goering has played a leadership role in his local Mennonite Action chapter, helping to organize protests around Gaza, ICE abuses, and at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible. In February, Goering joined a delegation that planted olive trees in the Palestinian West Bank.

Goering isn’t alone in his post-retirement activism. The wave of demonstrations against the authoritarian excesses of the second Trump regime has been marked by an abundance of gray hair. “In America, we associate activism with youth,” Deana Rohlinger, a sociologist at Florida State University, told Forbes magazine. “We often don’t see older Americans as engaged—but they are.”

Many of these active older people are retirees—and with more than 4 million baby boomers reaching age 65 each year from 2024 to 2027, it may be the largest stream of retirees ever, an inexorable “gray tsunami.” For newscaster Rachel Maddow, being older has its advantages: “When you’re a grandparent or a great-grandparent and a retired schoolteacher and a patriot, it’s really hard to convince anyone you’re a radical terrorist,” Maddow said on MSNBC last fall. “You’ve also been around the block, and you know the importance of protest.”

“The greatest thing I have to offer is my own personal experiences.”
—Samuel Buggs

When I retired in 2024 after more than four decades working at Sojourners as an organizer and editor, I was ready for a break from activism. I had no less of a passionate commitment to peace and “the biblical call to social justice,” as the Sojourners vision statement puts it, but 42 years of trying to change the world had taken its toll, and despite the deluge of daily atrocities perpetrated by President Trump and his minions, what I felt I needed was a time of rest and healing, even in the face of a nagging guilt that I wasn’t doing enough.

My extended community, on the other hand, is filled with people who are doing a lot, and many of them are recent retirees. I had conversations with people in my activist Mennonite church, friends and neighbors, and others with varied career paths who are quite active in their later years. They ranged in age from their early 60s to 79 years old. Most of them didn’t have the privilege during their careers of being paid to engage in work for social justice, but all of them are finding ways to make a difference in the world around them.

‘The freedom to explore’

FREED FROM WORKADAY job requirements, retirees often have time to participate in social activism. For one of my churchmates, Mary Hershberger, who retired as a history professor in 2017, that means, “I’m able to spend much more time doing things I want to and not doing things just because I have to.” Activism, including her leadership in actions against the atrocities in Gaza “is my work now,” Hershberger said, rather than fitting in activism between job responsibilities.

For many, that freedom comes with a sense of urgency. “I feel like I have a lot of time, and I also feel like there’s a ticking clock,” said Liane Rozzell, a 2024 retiree from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, where she worked on youth justice policy. “I could live another 30 years, but I feel the clock ticking in a certain way.”

“Being faithful is figuring out how to work social justice into our lives as we get older.”
—Sara Fretz-Goering

“I would say activism is like spirituality in action, spirituality with legs.”
—Mary Hershberger

Senior activism isn’t a new phenomenon. Maggie Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers 56 years ago, after being forced to retire at age 65 from her job with the United Presbyterian Church. She urged older people to “get out of their rocking chairs and into public affairs.” And scholars have long speculated on whether the crescendo of baby boomer retirements we’re now seeing would lead to an increase in political activism among older adults. For instance, a 1998 paper by John B. Williamson of the Center for Retirement Research asked, “Is the confrontational activism of the 1960s and early 1970s likely to show up again when the boomers reach old age?”

Bill McKibben, a leading environmental writer, Sojourners columnist, and founder of the elder-led movement Third Act, agrees that the transformational era of the 1960s and ’70s “is very much in our generation’s muscle memory.”

In an interview last fall with Maddow, McKibben explained, “I think one reason that older people have been turning out in such large numbers—and they have been heavily overrepresented in these demonstrations—is because everybody with a heart can tell that the Trump regime is bad news.” He added that senior activism can offer inspiration to younger people “in seeing that older people—boomers, Silent Generation—are not abandoning them, leaving the mess behind for them to clean up, but are showing up and trying to do something about it.”

For many retirees, “doing something” about social ills is not optional. Bob Sabath, a co-founder of Sojourners, told me, “I would probably argue that a Christian should never retire—I would use the word elderhood rather than retirement. When the job quits and I have all this free time, it doesn’t mean that I’m free to do whatever I want, because we have a responsibility as we age. It isn’t even necessarily a spiritual or a Christian responsibility; it’s just a human responsibility.”

For Rozzell, that responsibility entails what she called legacy work: “making things better for the next generations. The through line of my vocation hasn’t really changed that much” since retirement, Rozzell said. “It’s about trying to make the world better than it has been.”

What does change, for many retirees, is a new level of opportunity to engage in social activism. Marty Mellett, a 2023 retiree whose legal career landed him at places including a farmworker union, a Catholic archdiocese, and most recently the D.C. nonprofit Jubilee Housing, told me, “The freedom to step away from [paid work] gave me the freedom to explore, ‘What do I want to do differently?’ I don’t need this for the status or money; I’m doing it because it’s what I believe.”

Not everyone, as Mellett is quick to point out, has that kind of freedom. “A lot of people don’t have that privilege, that opportunity,” Mellett said. “I have some of that partly because I’ve had jobs that allow me to do that economically. That’s not true for a lot of folks who don’t have savings, who don’t have retirement, or maybe don’t have Social Security. For so many people in our world—in our country and in other countries—that’s not an option. They have to work until they die.”

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A different kind of ‘retirement’

MELLETT, A LONGTIME neighbor and friend, introduced me to Samuel Buggs, who recently served on the board of Jubilee Housing. Buggs didn’t “retire,” in any normal sense of the word, having spent 25 years incarcerated. “I have more of a criminal history than a work history,” he said.

These days, Buggs talks a lot about gratitude. “As I look back on my years of incarceration, and even my drug addiction, I’m just grateful to be where I am,” Buggs told me in a phone interview this spring. “I feel overwhelmingly blessed.”

After his release from prison in 2010, Buggs said he was living in Southeast D.C. and still involved in drug activities. “I just got to a point where, as they say in the meetings, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired,” he said. So Buggs moved to a new neighborhood—the Adams Morgan community in D.C.—and got involved in a “spiritual recovery” program through Christ House, a medically focused ministry for people experiencing homelessness that grew out of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Saviour. He moved into housing developed by Jubilee Housing, another Church of the Saviour-rooted nonprofit, and was later invited to serve on the nonprofit’s board.

“Those of us who see ourselves as engaged in service or justice, the pressure is there to jump back in full force.”
—Marty Mellett

“Something in me got reawakened. It was like opening the floodgates and letting the world hit me in a more vibrant way.”
—Bob Sabath

Buggs’ journey may not look the same as a standard-issue “retiree,” but he certainly feels he has something to give back to younger people. “The greatest thing I have to offer is my own personal experiences,” Buggs said. “I imagine myself being a walking, talking billboard that there is hope, there is a possibility for redemption, that you are able to change your life.”

Buggs offered some advice to those who are entering the “elder” phase of life: “We as humans have a tendency to focus in on the things we don’t have or we didn’t get, as opposed to the things that we do have,” he said. “Sometimes we don’t recognize all the blessings that are placed upon us.

“Once you recognize that you’ve been blessed ... the next thing to do is being a blessing to somebody else,” Buggs continued. “It’s so enriching to my spirit when I’m able to do something for somebody without expecting anything in return; it makes me feel great about myself. And it means to me that I’m not incorrigible, that there was hope, and I prove it every chance that I get.”

‘Spirituality with legs’

Many retirees talk about the gratitude they feel for their life experiences, their desire to keep active and continue making a difference in the world, and their sense of wanting to pass along to the next generation whatever wisdom they’ve managed to accrue. And many of them use spiritual and faith language to describe their involvement in social activism.

“Being faithful is figuring out how to work social justice into our lives as we get older,” said Sara Fretz-Goering, a member of Hyattsville Mennonite Church who retired in 2014 after 28 years as a public-school teacher. “We’re just as relevant, just in different ways.”

When asked how a “spirituality of retirement” relates to activism, Hershberger, the retired history professor, said, “Spirituality can sometimes be seen as a private or personal thing, but to me it seems like a full spirituality implies connection to others. I would say activism is like spirituality in action, spirituality with legs.”

Others spoke of the importance of spiritual practices and disciplines to stay centered in troubling and chaotic times—from regular prayer and meditation to daily walks and writing. “Especially in this moment in our country, trying to stay centered and have some level of hope, when it feels like the authoritarian dictatorship stuff is encroaching so deeply into our society, raises the question, ‘How do I engage?’” Mellett said. “If I’m not trying to stay centered, I’m either moving into hopelessness or just running around going to things, and neither of those are good. So, for me, it’s important to try to stay centered.”

After her retirement, Fretz-Goering wrote a novel dealing with issues around aging, with an older woman as the central character. “I wanted to explore, ‘Why can’t this last chapter be as exciting as our 20s?’” For Fretz-Goering, “Writing is a spiritual practice. When you’re really writing, you’re in that flow. And that, to me, is what a spiritual practice is—it’s getting into that flow.”

‘I have a shelf life’

Sabath, a mentor to me in the Sojourners community and now my across-the-street neighbor, was diagnosed in 2019 with an aggressive cancer called Burkitt lymphoma. “That was a real marker for me of moving from ‘Bob is going to live forever’ to ‘I have a shelf life,’” Sabath said.

“There was something in me that got reawakened. It was like opening the floodgates and letting the world hit me in a more vibrant way—not just the brokenness of the world, but the real joy.”

Serious illness, of course, has a way of providing a wake-up call for anyone who hasn’t thought much, or is in denial, about their own mortality. But the mere act of getting older and retiring—entering what is unavoidably the “final phase of life”—can spark deep reflection on the question, “How am I going to use these precious last years?”

That kind of discernment takes time and intentionality. In that spirit, a common piece of advice for new retirees is to take a while to figure out what’s next. “My spiritual director encouraged me to take a couple months to do some reading and reflecting on what’s important to you and what you want to do,” Mellett said. “Those of us who see ourselves as engaged in mission work or service or justice, the pressure is there to jump back in full force and not be seen as someone who’s going to just play golf. I didn’t just want to play and have fun the rest of my life. There can be a middle ground: I’m sitting still to think about, ‘What are the gifts you want to give? What’s a priority to you?’”

For many retirees, staying active and giving back is a way to live out deeply held beliefs—and it’s very satisfying. “I’ve met people who didn’t get the chance to do the kind of work” they were passionate about, Mellett said. “Now I see them stepping in [to service and justice activities] and being pretty excited about it. It’s good for their souls and good for the world. And they have skills that can be brought to bear. That’s a good thing.”

Making the world a better place for their grandchildren is a common motivator for many retirees. “When we came back from [teaching in] Congo in the 1980s, we had children, and I so wanted my children to grow up in a world that was safe,” Hershberger said. “Now I have grandchildren, and I want the same thing for them.”

Hershberger had some advice for people entering into the retirement years: “If there’s ever a time when your life should have meaning, it’s definitely at the end, when you retire,” she said. “Do things that give your life meaning. Try to get lost in something bigger than you are.

“What are we here for if not to make life better for one another?” she said, paraphrasing George Eliot. “So go out there and find something that needs fixing,” she added. “You might not be able to fix it, but trying is wonderful!”