How Boomers Can Save What’s Left Of America For Younger Generations
The Baby Boomers grew up in a completely different world than their children and grandchildren live in today. They need to know that and respond.They say diamonds are forever, but so are humans. We do not stop existing at the death of our bodies. And that is why the death of Gloria Steinem should cause us to think seriously about more than her political legacy as a leftist activist.
Steinem died Wednesday at age 92. She will be remembered as one of the most influential feminists of the last century, a co-founder of Ms. magazine, and a leader in the movement that made abortion a defining element of modern feminism.
Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.
But there is another person whose life must be remembered when we remember Steinem: the unborn child she aborted.
Steinem became pregnant at 22. She had broken off an engagement and was preparing to leave for India. Abortion was illegal in Britain except in limited circumstances, but a physician, John Sharpe, helped her obtain one.
Decades later, Steinem dedicated her memoir, “My Life on the Road,” to Sharpe. She remembered his words to her: “You must promise me two things.” One was that she not reveal his name. The other was: “You will do what you want to do with your life.”
Those words summarize an entire moral revolution.
But what about the other life? What did that child want to do with his or her life?
That child never went to India. Never went to school. Never chose a career. Never fell in love. Never held a child. Never traveled, wrote a book, changed political parties, found religion, rejected religion, made mistakes, sought forgiveness, or grew old.
The philosophy supposedly centered on “choice” began by taking every choice away from someone else. There is no higher level of selfishness than to end another person’s life so that person does not get in the way of your own plans.
What does this tell us about the human heart?
Steinem once said, “I didn’t go to school until I was 12, so I missed a little bit of social conditioning.” She considered freedom from conventional social expectations liberating. That theme ran through her life: question inherited rules, throw off imposed roles, and determine your own destiny. In its most radical form, modern feminism treats human rules as mere social constructs and “being yourself” as acting on your desires without discipline or correction.
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There is something attractive about that message. Human beings should question unjust traditions. But there is a darker possibility. What if the moral law we are overthrowing is not merely “social conditioning”? What if some acts really are wrong regardless of what society says? Steinem’s questioning was not merely philosophical curiosity. It echoed the sin of Genesis 3: the desire to become one’s own god, even to claim power over the life of another human being.
The most frightening capacity of the human mind is not ignorance. It is self-justification. We can take something terrible and give it a noble name.
Steinem did not merely defend her abortion reluctantly. She later described it as taking “responsibility for my own life.” She said she tried to make herself feel guilty by imagining how old her child would have been. It is as if Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov had stopped midway through “Crime and Punishment,” still convinced that murder could elevate him above ordinary morality.
That is chilling precisely because the child disappears from the moral calculation.
Her life. Her responsibility. Her choice. Her future.
But another human being had a life too.
What does this say about the movement that followed her?
Steinem did not keep this reasoning private. She helped make it a political philosophy.
Millions of Americans were taught to describe abortion in the language of liberation, autonomy, and reproductive freedom. The unborn child became almost linguistically invisible. We learned to talk endlessly about the woman’s future while refusing to talk about the future being deliberately ended.
That is how moral revolutions work. They do not normally begin by convincing people to celebrate evil as evil. They rename it as something good.
Murder becomes “choice.”
The destruction of a human life becomes “health care.”
And denying another human being her entire future becomes “doing what you want with your life.”
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The lesson of Steinem’s life is therefore larger than Steinem. She became influential because millions of people found that reasoning persuasive. A culture embraced the astonishing proposition that equality could be advanced by denying the most defenseless human beings even the equality of being allowed to live.
And now comes the question death forces upon us.
Christians believe Gloria Steinem still exists. We also believe her child still exists. Death does not make our actions disappear. It removes our ability to distract ourselves from them.
Imagine the question that child could ask: Mom, why did you kill me? Why was your future worth more than mine? Why did you get to “do what you want to do with your life” while deciding that I would never get to do anything with mine?
And widen the circle. What of the millions whose deaths were justified by the political movement Steinem helped lead? What happens when slogans about “reproductive freedom” meet the human beings whose lives those slogans helped extinguish?
Gloria Steinem’s death should remind us that human beings are forever. That makes killing infinitely more serious than our culture wants to admit.
And it makes repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God infinitely more urgent.
The great question is not whether history praises us after we die. It is whether the God who gave life agrees with what we did with it. Steinem now stands before His judgment seat.
The text from my friend contained one of the stranger questions I have ever received from a family planning a funeral: “Do you know ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’?”
I stared at my phone, a bit wild-eyed. My first instinct was to reply, “Why do you ask?” Instead, I simply wrote, “Yes.”
In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.
His mother had died after a long battle with Parkinson’s. The song was one of her favorites, and the family had sung it with her for years. They hoped I could play it during a slideshow at her memorial service.
I have been a pianist longer than I have been a caregiver, which is saying something. Over the years, families have invited me to play at hundreds of funerals, and I never take that invitation lightly.
As a preacher’s kid, I began as cheap labor for my father’s church: Sunday services, weddings, funerals. I did it all. I no longer play weddings unless enormous amounts of money or extraordinary affection are involved. There is simply too much drama. Funerals are different. If possible, I still play them.
A grieving family does not need entertainment or musical pomp. They need someone willing to serve the moment. Music should give grief room to breathe while gently lifting people’s eyes, even if only an inch.
That assignment becomes considerably more demanding when the requested song is “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
I could have treated it as a novelty, played the familiar tune, collected a few smiles, and moved on. But this family was not asking for a joke. They were asking me to honor their mother.
A funeral is one of the few remaining places in American life where we must confront the difference between entertainment and reverence. Our culture can turn nearly anything into content, spectacle, or argument. A family’s grief deserves better.
My father had died not long before this service. He was a pastor who understood ceremony. He did not confuse reverence with stiffness or ceremony with showmanship. He knew some moments deserve the very best we can bring to them. His lessons sat close as I worked on the arrangement.
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Before moving to Montana, I lived and played in Nashville. Nashville taught me polish. Montana reminded me of intimacy. In a small rural sanctuary, every note sits close to the people who need it.
I did not try to make “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sacred. The song was not sacred. The moment was.
A family’s love was sacred. A life well lived was sacred. So was the faith that endured years of Parkinson’s and the long goodbye that accompanied it.
I arranged the piece more slowly than usual, but not sorrowfully; tenderly, but not timidly. I added a few chords no one expects to hear in “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” My wife calls them my “non-sanctified chords.”
When I played it for her at home, she wiped her eyes. “You played it so respectfully,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
I called one of the daughters and asked for the exact length of the slideshow. Then I shaped the arrangement to fit it.
At the service, the pastor introduced the slideshow: “It is set to one of her favorite songs, ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ played by Peter Rosenberger.”
After decades at the piano, I had never received an introduction quite like that. Chuckles rolled through the sanctuary. I understood. Then the pictures began.
Childhood. Marriage. Ranch life. Children. Grandchildren.
As her life unfolded across the screen, the novelty disappeared. The room settled into stillness. A playful song associated with happy memories in her home began carrying the weight of a family’s love and loss.
I timed the final chord to the last photograph of her face. For a moment, no one moved. The chuckles had given way to misty eyes. That familiar little tune had slipped past everyone’s defenses and carried something deeper than anyone expected.
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Christians do not pretend that Parkinson’s is beautiful or that death is merely another happy chapter. Scripture calls death the last enemy. But it also declares that Christ has defeated it. For those in Christ, suffering does not receive the final word. Neither does Parkinson’s. Neither does the grave.
The song was not the gospel, and I did not pretend it was. But it carried the memory of a woman who had sung it through years of suffering. In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.
My father’s death still weighed heavily on me as I played. Perhaps that helped me understand the assignment. Even amid our own grief, we can offer the best of what we have to someone walking through theirs.
Sometimes grief calls for a great hymn. Sometimes it calls for silence. And every now and then, it calls for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
Because for those who belong to Christ, everything really is … satisfactual.
Alan Greenspan died in June at 100. They got him.
Have you noticed that nobody ever really “dies” any more?
Move the deadline often enough, and eventually everyone dies right on schedule.
Certainly nobody famous. Nobody politically important. Nobody who once knew somebody important, embarrassed somebody important, or appeared in a photograph with the Clintons.
Those people don’t die. They get silenced. They knew too much. They were about to expose something. They crossed the wrong people.
They get“got.”
The lovely actress Hayden Panettiere died last Sunday at 36, about a week short of her 37th birthday. She was found in cardiac arrest at an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina. Paramedics could not revive her.
At the moment, the cause and manner of death remain undetermined. An autopsy found no trauma contributing to her death, and police found no evidence of foul play. The Drug Enforcement Administration is assisting Greenville police. All signs point to a drug overdose, though.
Naturally, the internet has already solved the case: Hollywood killed her.
The former “Heroes” and “Nashville” star published a memoir in May called “This Is Me: A Reckoning.” She described some genuinely ugly experiences as a young actress. At 18, she said, a woman she trusted put her into bed aboard a yacht with a famous British singer-songwriter. At 19, an Oscar-winning actor exposed himself to her at a party. She identified neither man.
You can see where this goes.
She knew things. She wrote a book. Three months later, she’s dead.
Case closed.
Except another corner of the internet identified a different culprit. Libertarian writer Jeffrey A. Tucker responded to Panettiere’s death by asking, “Is it time to stop this absurd gaslighting? Everyone knows the murder weapon.”
He meant the COVID-19 vaccine.
Tucker is a smart fellow. He’s been a hero in the fight against COVID tyranny. But I think he got ahead of himself here.
Or maybe when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I love conspiracy theories. I love sound arguments more.
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Conspiracies exist. Watergate was a conspiracy. COINTELPRO was real. MKUltra was real. Corporations conceal evidence. Governments lie all the time. Sometimes a suspicious death really is suspicious.
Nevertheless, conspiracies require evidence.
That seems to be the part many of us have let go.
Antonin Scalia died in his sleep at a Texas hunting ranch in 2016. He was 79, had serious health problems, and no autopsy was performed. Early confusion about the circumstances — including an unfortunately described pillow — turned his death almost instantly into a murder mystery.
Ah, but Barack Obama needed a Supreme Court vacancy, didn’t he? Even Donald Trump entertained the speculation publicly.
Sure. On the other hand, old men die.
Four years later, Scalia’s “best buddy” Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at 87 after years of recurring cancer.
And, mostly, she died like any other elderly woman.
There was fury over her replacement and a bitter confirmation fight over Amy Coney Barrett. But nobody built much of a murder theory around an 87-year-old woman with metastatic pancreatic cancer.
Evidently, some important people are still permitted to die in peace.
Conspiracy theories about famous deaths are hardly new. John F. Kennedy alone has supported an industry for more than 60 years. What social media has done is speed up production.
Now, within minutes of a public figure’s death, thousands of people can search old interviews, posts, photographs, and acquaintances for the clue that explains everything. Then comes the question: What are the odds?
Usually, nobody knows.
Earlier this year, I experienced what doctors called “stroke-like symptoms.” High blood pressure appears to have been the culprit. I also got two Moderna shots in 2021.
I regret getting the jabs. But according to some of the loudest alarmists at the time, they should have killed me by 2022.
Somehow, I lived.
Five years later, I had something approximating a stroke, and now somebody can point backward and say: See? The vaccine!
Sorry, no. You don’t get to predict that millions of vaccinated people will drop dead within a year, watch the prediction fail, then spend the next few years claiming every heart attack, stroke, cancer diagnosis, and celebrity death as vindication.
Move the deadline often enough, and eventually everyone dies right on schedule.
That doesn’t mean suspicion is foolish. Sometimes the official story really is wrong. Sometimes — often! — institutions deserve skepticism.
But skepticism asks questions. A conspiracy theory that begins with the answer is something else.
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That’s what makes Panettiere’s death such an awkwardly perfect example. We have an unexplained death, a troubling memoir, a history of addiction, the DEA assisting police, and no final cause — yet.
That is plenty of fodder for speculation.
It isn’t enough for certainty, which we so desperately desire.
So nobody merely has a heart attack. Nobody merely overdoses. Nobody simply grows old. Nobody has a stroke. Strokes are boring; trust me.
No, somebody did it. Somebody got got.
Alan Greenspan lived to 100. He palled around with Ayn Rand. He chaired the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades. He advised presidents. He moved markets by clearing his throat.
Then he croaked.
No assassins. No cover-up. No final secret — as far as anyone knows.
Death got him.
Eventually, it gets us all.
Across Canada, Europe, and a growing number of U.S. states, assisted death is increasingly presented as relief from suffering. The Netherlands even uses “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement” as part of its legal standard for euthanasia.
Before lawmakers and physicians define suffering as unbearable, they should listen to someone who has borne it.
No one can bear a lifetime of suffering at once. But the shepherd gives grace for the next 24 hours.
In a recent interview with my longtime friend Joni Eareckson Tada, she addressed California’s End of Life Option Act.
“It’s almost like people who feel they live with unbearable suffering can just move to California and end it all,” she said.
“Unbearable” does a great deal of heavy lifting in that sentence.
A diving accident at 17 left Joni a quadriplegic. Now turning 77, she has endured two rounds of breast cancer and decades of chronic pain.
By almost any ordinary measure, Joni has endured what lawmakers increasingly describe as unbearable suffering. Yet she is still here. Still serving. Still living a life of substance and consequence.
She has written more than 60 books, reaches more than a million radio listeners, and leads a worldwide disability ministry. Few living Christian voices speak more clearly to those who suffer.
At the end of our interview, I asked whether she would ever retire.
“No.”
Joni cited Paul, torn between departing to be with Christ and remaining because others still needed him. Heaven was “far better,” but the work was unfinished.
She does not minimize pain. She rejects death as its most compassionate answer.
I have spent 40 years beside my wife, Gracie, who has endured 98 operations, bilateral amputations, and relentless pain.
Joni sees unbearable suffering from the wheelchair. I see it from beside the wheelchair.
She sees the suffering person think, “My life has become a burden.”
I see the caregiver think, “This burden is mine alone.”
My own recent cancer treatment brought a familiar question to the front row: Who will care for the person I love when I no longer can?
As assisted death spreads, vulnerable people can hear another question beneath the language of choice: Would everyone else be relieved if I were gone?
That is where compassion can become something darker.
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Death can begin to look like the answer to suffering we fear, consequences we refuse to bear, or lives that ask more of us than we believe we can give.
The prevailing creed is autonomy: I alone decide what suffering I will endure and what another person’s life may require of me. The same logic appears in abortion: No life may demand more of me than I am willing to give.
But once death becomes an accepted answer to suffering, the judgment does not remain entirely private. Families, physicians, insurers, and institutions inevitably begin weighing burdens, costs, prognosis, and quality of life.
They may call that compassion. Christian compassion asks something harder.
Compassion enters suffering. It does not eliminate the sufferer.
If suffering is merely random, eliminating the sufferer can masquerade as mercy. But if a sovereign God rules over this world, suffering is never meaningless or beyond His reach.
Christianity rejects that counterfeit compassion. We entrust ourselves to Christ and enter the burdens of others.
Human worth is not conferred by health, independence, or usefulness. God made us in His image. Paul calls members of Christ’s body who appear weaker “indispensable” (1 Corinthians 12:22).
But what sustains us when the pain does not end?
Joni’s answer is not willpower. Gracie’s answer is not optimism. They are sustained by Christ.
What does that look like?
No one can bear a lifetime of suffering all at once. But the shepherd gives grace for the next 24 hours. Psalm 23 does not promise a short valley. It promises we will not be abandoned within it.
Following Gracie’s 92nd operation, she returned to her hospital room tangled in tubes and IV lines. A young nursing assistant came in to check on her.
Still emerging from anesthesia, Gracie sensed something was wrong.
“How are you?” she whispered.
Tears filled the woman’s eyes as she confided that her marriage was in trouble.
Gracie threaded her hand through the lines and took the woman’s hand. Then she weakly quoted her friend Joni: “God permits what He hates to accomplish what He loves.”
Neither woman could see what God was doing. Neither believed He was doing nothing.
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The woman’s shoulders straightened, and she breathed a little easier.
Gracie was one beggar showing another where she had found bread.
We do not become someone else’s savior. Even from within our own anguish, we can help people catch their breath and point them to the Savior who understands their suffering and whose purposes extend beyond what we can explain.
“Bear one another’s burdens,” Paul writes, “and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).
That command applies to everyone who belongs to Christ. It cannot be outsourced.
If we say Christ is sufficient, visible obedience should follow.
Do we take Him at His word? If we do, how would anyone know?
They would see us entering the burdens of others.
Sometimes to sit. Sometimes to carry. At all times, to point to the Savior.
Bryan Johnson, the transhumanist founder of the neurotechnology company Kernel, sold his digital payments company Braintree to eBay Inc. for $800 million in 2013, then pursued his bio-hacking obsession headlong, tinkering with his body in the hope of pausing the aging process and potentially even evading death.
In a 2023 interview with Bloomberg, Johnson revealed that in addition to staying out of the sun, he was preparing to invest at least $2 million on his body with the aim of having the body and organs — penis and rectum included — of an 18-year-old. To this end, he hired a team of over 30 doctors and health experts to monitor his every bodily function.
'My stomach is eating itself.'
"What I do may sound extreme, but I'm trying to prove that self-harm and decay are not inevitable," Johnson said just months before supplementing his usual supply of rejuvenating plasma from so-called blood boys with blood from his son.
Johnson, who calls himself "the healthiest person alive" and founded the "Don't Die" health cult, revealed last week that he has been diagnosed with an incurable disease.
"Bad news #1: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself," the middle-aged transhumanist wrote in an X post.
"Good news: I'm going to try and solve it," he added.
Johnson suggested that he developed autoimmune gastritis during a period in his life when he was juggling "stress and grind" and let his health slip.
Autoimmune gastritis is an inherited chronic inflammatory disease that occurs when an individual's immune system attacks their stomach lining cells. According to the Cleveland Clinic, this condition can lead to an increased risk of developing small neuroendocrine tumors in the stomach and an increased risk of gastric cancer.
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"I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it," the transhumanist said. "AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects."
Johnson indicated further that his supposedly healthy living regimen failed to address his low iron levels.
'Bro so busy trying to not die he forgot how to live.'
Autoimmune gastritis destroys the stomach's parietal cells, which reduces secretion of the gastric acid required for absorption of inorganic iron.
Only after the supposed "healthiest person alive" overhauled his medical team and underwent further testing was his incurable condition revealed.
While there is presently no cure for autoimmune gastritis, Johnson said that he and his team are "going to try and solve my AIG."
Johnson's non-terminal diagnosis appears to have only worsened his health obsession.
"We fill our days mostly on things that are trivial next to what we ultimately care about. We know, deep down, however, that in the noise of it all, health is easily forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters," the transhumanist wrote.
Bryan did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
Following his disease reveal, Johnson lashed out at those whose who, according to his paraphrase, suggested that "bro so busy trying to not die he forgot how to live."
In response, the transhumanist offered a pessimistic and reductive interpretation of the world, suggesting that people ultimately construct personas to shield themselves "from the terror of their inevitable death," then "to make this irreconcilable pain invisible to themselves, they dissolve themselves into the group and enact its rituals."
He proceeded to characterize himself as a heroic figure — the "abstainer" from "societal death rituals" who "reveals to the room that they are drunk."
According to the transhumanist — who takes hundreds of pills a day, follows a strict plant-based diet, has injected some of his son's blood, and has spent a fortune in a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable — Johnson's critics aren't troubled by his decisions but by "their reflection in the mirror."
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Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) ratified a radical piece of Democratic legislation last week that will force colleges across the state to moonlight as dispensaries for abortion drugs like mifepristone, thereby encouraging college-age women to abort the next generation.
'College students shouldn't have to go through hoops.'
House Bill 1335 — a bill sponsored by state Rep. Lorena Garcia, a Democrat who ensured last year that all Coloradan taxpayers contribute to abortion — requires that:
The law goes into effect on Aug. 1, 2027.
Among the organizations that condemned the legislation and urged Polis to consider a veto was the Colorado Catholic Conference, which deemed HB 1335 "a violation of the sanctity of life of preborn children."
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"Requiring colleges and universities to stockpile abortion pills will destroy more human life and cause serious physical, emotional and mental harm to many young women," the CCC stated. "Additionally, HB26-1335 violates the religious freedom of insurers who do not cover abortion."
Lydia Davis, a spokeswoman for Students for Life of America, warned about the dangers of abortion drugs.
Davis told the College Fix that "these deadly drugs have killed millions of babies, harmed women, and polluted our water systems with chemically tainted fetal remains flushed into our sewer systems. This bill would turn college campuses into abortion distribution centers and continue transforming our sewers into cemeteries."
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, there were at least 36 patient deaths associated with mifepristone between September 2000 and December 2024.
Adverse events have also been reported in 2,740 cases of women who took mifepristone to kill their unborn children. Between November 2012 and December 2024, 288 women who used mifepristone were hospitalized; 190 experienced blood loss requiring transfusions; and 114 suffered infections, the USDA reported.
Rebecca Weaver, director of advocacy for the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists Action, said in her written testimony to Colorado lawmakers that the legislation "imposes sweeping requirements without establishing basic medical safeguards, creating significant risks to women's health and undermining standards of care."
Lloyd Benes, a Coloradan who testified earlier this year in opposition to the legislation, echoed some of AAPLOG Action's concerns in an op-ed in the Loveland Reporter-Herald last month, stating that the legislation does not require campus clinics to provide informed consent; has no in-person dispensing requirement, raising concerns about potential coercion; has no ultrasound requirement, perhaps leaving ectopic pregnancies undetected; has no guidance on the disposal of human remains; and lacks conscience protections.
After Polis signed the bill into law, state Rep. Garcia stated, "This new law makes sure college students can easily access their constitutionally-protected right to reproductive healthcare. For college students, their entire lives center around campus, and this law makes medication abortion accessible through a student health clinic or pharmacy."
State Rep. Kenny Nguyen (D) said, "College students shouldn't have to go through hoops to receive their constitutionally-protected right to an abortion. Our law streamlines access to medication abortion accessible so college students can receive life-saving care."
Regis University, a private Catholic school in Denver, is exempt from the law, Axios reported.
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