Op-Ed: How Could I Be Anybody Else?

I’m about to turn 60 in just over a week and I keep thinking about what it means to still be here. Not just alive, but still myself, still recognizable to the values I claimed decades ago, still walking forward with purpose, even on days when the streets have gone quiet.

It hit me hard on a recent flight. One of those six—or eight-hour treks with a layover, heading off to stand on another stage or sit in a strategy meeting. Nobody counts the prep calls, the missed special moments at home, the long travel days wrapped around a single hour at a podium. Bad beds, cold food and a human back that can no longer endure it all. Jammed into seat 18E, I felt a flash of resentment so hot it startled me. It was unlike me. Then I laughed under my breath: of course I’m resentful. I’m almost 60, and my body feels every bit of it.

I wasn’t promised 60. Black men in this country learn early that longevity is not a given. It’s something we carve out of resistance, stubbornness, or sheer luck. So, I don’t take this lightly. Not the breath in my lungs. Not the weight in my bones. Not the spaces I get to take up.

I feel it most getting up and out of compact cars, lower core, slow to uncurl. Sometimes, I simply stand in the backyard just breathing in the cold or heat, because it means I’m still here.

I’ve lived enough to know that survival is not the same as freedom. I’ve felt that tension in my body—in the tightness of my chest when the world demanded stillness, and I wanted to scream.

When my warnings of what was coming to America made me an outsider in my own social movements. Those times where I was mocked sometimes, undercut, treated like I was breaking the collective spell that wrongly argued that demographics alone would save us—even as the ground shifted under all our feet.

I’ve heard that same tension in music, especially in “Do Nothing” by The Specials. A song that doesn’t just play—it haunts. It holds the ache of doing what you’re told while knowing none of it fits. It’s what alienation sounds like when it’s been sharpened into a beat. That track came out in 1980, when unemployment was soaring, Thatcher and Reagan were gutting working-class towns, and kids like me were starting to feel the brief ground of racial justice give way beneath our feet. It’s the very song that finally convinced me to leave Long Beach, Calif., for Oregon in 1986.

Ska and punk weren’t just sounds—they were survival kits, ways to name what was wrong and dance through it anyway. That’s what hooked me—the raw defiance of a beat that refused to break, even when everything else did. It was the music that taught me it was okay to mourn, rage and still find joy amid the personal, economic and social earthquakes. And of those times, there were to be many.

And still—still, I’ve lived.

I’ve done well in this life, and I’ve also gotten it wrong. I’ve let my pride speak too loudly. I’ve stayed silent when my voice might have mattered. There are people I’ve disappointed. People I’ve hurt. Some I never got to make things right with. That sits with me. I try, every day, to live more honestly in the shadow of what I didn’t get right.

Most days I now think about watching my own subculture get exploited by political agendas that never saw us as more than expendable fodder. It took me a decade to really see it, and another decade to find the guts to say it out loud—afraid I’d be written off or blamed for fracturing the only culture that feels like home. Instead, I steered my very non-infinite energy toward whoever someone else deemed “most vulnerable,” too scared to name that my own people. The forgotten, the shunned, the ones treated as uncomfortable and inconvenient when they had no political use, were some of the most vulnerable, too. I still see those faces. Some are now gone. Some just lost. Missed chances, missed truths. They haunt me.

But I’ve also known joy that I didn’t think was mine to have. Loves that have remade me. Those rare moments of absolute clarity—on stages, on sidewalks, in conversation, in stillness.

I remember a drive from Chicago to Toronto, a car full of family from Portland, Phoenix, and Chicago, on our way to see The Oppressed, Fear City and The Prowlers. A family reunion with no beefs, just great music, cheap drinks, reggae rolling through the speakers and laughter that made the miles seem like nothing. I remember nights in Long Beach, Eugene, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Blue Island, Oakland and San Francisco—warm air and someone’s laughter folding me into a sense of home I never expected, but always hoped for when I was a pre-teenager.

I’ve been part of things that mattered. I’ve fought for people and been changed by people. I’ve danced in rooms where I forgot the weight I carry and just let the music hold me.

Shoulder to shoulder with people I would never see again, slipping and falling into a crew of Irish skinheads amid a concert in the heart of London, my whiskey spraying everyone down—then being picked up, dusted off, and handed a beer. Sweat running down my spine, skinheads, punks and casuals pressing in, all of us shouting the same words back at the stage.

There’s a line in “Do Nothing” that always finds me:

“People say to me / just be yourself

It makes no sense / to follow fashion

How could I / be anybody else

I don’t try / I got no reason”

I’ve spent most of my life navigating that paradox, being told to be real while knowing the world can’t handle my truth. And still, I’ve stayed true. That’s my quiet rebellion.

At 60, I know the score. The average life expectancy for Black men in this country is about 72 years. Twelve years left—give or take.

They never tell you that in a society that expects Black men to be a “young lion” forever. A society that wants you to keep carrying the weight as though your body won’t break down, your heart won’t get heavy, your energy won’t dip. A society that expects much from Black men and often gives little in return. It demands youth without regard for longevity. They treat us like we’re meant to run on empty, as if they haven’t already drained us dry. And still, we’re expected to keep showing up.

But that’s not my story. I reject it. This chapter is mine to write, not theirs to dictate. And I refuse to let age—my experience, my wisdom, my earned rest—be treated as something to ignore. I refuse to shrink into that narrative. I’m here, still burning, but I’m also demanding the space to just be, without the weight of anyone else’s expectations.

Sixty doesn’t feel like a finish line. It feels like a checkpoint. A place to pause and ask: Am I still walking in the direction of who I say I want to be? Am I still choosing substance over spectacle, connection over ego, justice over comfort? I want the answer to be yes.

And if I’m still here to ask again at 70, I hope the answer is still yes.

I hope anyone reading this—whoever you are—sees themselves in the spaces between these words. In the contradictions. In the regrets. In the hope. In the noise and the silence. I hope it reminds you: it’s not too late to come home to yourself.

Sixty is its own kind of grace. It’s the weight of old scars and the surprise of new joys. It’s hearing a song from your youth and feeling every version of yourself dance inside you. It’s the quiet pride of having survived what could have broken you, and the tender ache for people and places long gone. Sixty is knowing that after all the miles, all the mistakes, all the small, hard-fought victories—this is still your life, precious and unfinished.

Maybe that’s the point of reaching 60—not to have it all figured out, but to finally hold your own story with a kind of tender reverence. To see that every wrong turn, every late-night conversation, every heartbreak and every triumph wove something unmistakably yours. To stand here, still curious, still open, still willing to be surprised. If there’s any lesson at this age, it’s that the heart keeps stretching to hold more: more forgiveness, more laughter, more of the messy, glorious business of being alive.

So, here’s to 60. To the people who held me up and the ones I let down. To the songs that told the truth when the world lied. To the rhythms that stitched me back together. To the fire that still burns, quietly but unmistakably.

I’m here, still moving and I hope you are as well.

Still honest.

Still defiant.

Still listening to “Do Nothing”—and hearing everything I need.

Eric K. Ward is a longtime civil rights strategist and activist, known for confronting white nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-Black racism. He’s the Executive Vice President at Race Forward, a Senior Fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a recipient of the Civil Courage Prize for his work defending democracy.

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