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.”
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