Denzel Washington has described life in three sections. First you learn, then you earn, and then you return, by which he means giving back. Most of us were raised inside that shape, and nobody had to write it down, because everybody could see it working.
I have spent two years watching North Frontenac as a journalist, and my family has lived here for the better part of a decade. What I see now is that shape breaking, and I believe it is breaking from the top down.
Start with the young. When I talk to young people here, the trouble is rarely intelligence. They are quick and curious, and plenty of them can do things on a phone in a minute that their grandparents would spend days on, or give up on entirely and pretend does not exist. What too many of them lack is a settled sense of right and wrong. Their ethics are confused at best, and their discipline has not been inspired. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force anyone to have discipline. You have to inspire it, and that job belongs to the older generations, myself included. Morals are taught mostly by example, and the people whose job it was to set that example have been busy with other things.
Then look at the middle, the people doing the earning. The working class is being squeezed from every side at once. A retiree takes the part-time shift because the pension does not stretch. Someone with a PhD applies for the same shift, since there is nothing in their field. The student wants it for tuition and the teenager because the family is short. For the newcomer to this country, it is the only door open. Everyone is standing in one line for a handful of jobs, and the people who get them are often not paid enough to live on either.
Now add artificial intelligence. From where I sit, office work is being handed over to software faster than anyone in power wants to admit, and I have not heard a serious plan for the people it leaves behind. The standard advice is to go into the trades. It is true that AI, as it stands today, cannot frame a house or fix a well pump. But if everyone who loses a desk job picks up a hammer, contractors end up bidding against each other and the price of skilled work drops. That only works out if there is a great deal to build and somebody willing to pay to build it. Whether that somebody is government, and whether anyone will help people through the change in the meantime, is a question nobody at the top seems ready to ask out loud.
That brings me to the last stage, and the hardest part of this to write. The third stage of life is supposed to be about returning. You have learned and you have earned, and now you hand it on. It is the time to give up the chair at the head of the table and spend your years teaching what you know about decency and keeping your word.
That is not what I see. In this township, and in rural places like it, the seats of power are held mostly by seniors and boomers, and they are not letting go. The ones holding the seats will not recognize that the generations behind them are, in many practical ways, further along. Younger people handle technology the way their grandparents handled a newspaper, and they understand the internet because they grew up inside it. Gen X is harder to pin down. A lot of them are comfortable with technology, often depending on how close they sit to the millennials, and I would not lump them in.
Say that out loud to the people in those seats and you are told you are attacking them. Criticism gets heard as an insult, and the conversation is over before it starts.
Part of the reason, I think, is technology itself. Many people in that generation never really learned it. The narrow slice they do use, often a single social feed and a few familiar pages, has quietly become their entire picture of the world. It sorts people into tribes and rewards suspicion, and because it is the only window they look through, they cannot see how small it is. Now a new tool has arrived and the same reflex has kicked in. Too many of them are waving AI off without learning it, the way they waved off nearly everything that came before.
This matters to everyone, including them. The young people being brushed aside are the ones who will be caring for them in their last years, and the tradespeople being squeezed will be fixing their roofs and building the schools our grandchildren walk into. Every time someone in a council chamber or on a board dismisses a younger person's idea, or treats a fair question as an attack, they are cutting the very people they will depend on off at the kneecaps. Most of the time I think it is habit rather than malice, and fear of a world they did not choose.
And because the third stage exists to teach the first, the confusion I see in young people did not come from nowhere. Character is handed down. When the people at the top model a tight grip on power and a thin skin, that is the lesson the children learn.
This is not an attack. I am writing it because I care about this place and everyone in it, old and young. I want our elders to have the generous, dignified last chapter that the old shape of life promised them. That chapter means letting go of the chair and sitting beside the younger people instead of above them, willing to learn something new from them, AI included.
You spent a lifetime learning and earning. The best thing left to give is room.