“Quaint.” That is a word that was recently deployed by a commentator, aimed at baby boomers, charged with arrogance, manifesting ignorance. It requires a response. Here is mine.

In the year of my birth, 1959, man saw the dark side of the moon for the first time via a fuzzy photograph. I was a space-age child who watched every rocket lift off on the classroom TV, every time thrilled. I was one of legions of children who witnessed mankind’s first step on the moon in real time, experiencing a connection to the heavens that, for many of us, has only deepened over the decades.

I was a teenager who delved into science fiction, filled with wonder and also fear for what the future might hold. “Brave New World” and “1984” were jarring stories that deepened my understanding of how every individual profoundly mattered, by showing me what happened when we forgot.

I was a child of a naval officer and a nuclear engineer, who patrolled off the coastline of Vietnam during the war years, and later responded to the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant’s partial meltdown. I grew into a woman deeply afraid of nuclear disaster, be it by war or accident. I am still deeply afraid, not because I am “quaint,” but because I am aware. This awareness drives my political conscience.

I was a child who had friends whose fathers were killed or imprisoned in Vietnam. I saw veterans returned home with their terrible wounds. I learned war had irrevocable consequences before I was 9 years old; that, too, drives my political conscience.

I was a 5-year-old white child who learned and played with a Black child integrated in an all-white school. Later, I understood the significance of our being in the same classroom, and no doubt at all, the bravery of her parents. I realized I might well have been inoculated against racial discrimination, for their bravery.

I was a girl who witnessed the segregation of disabled children, kept strangers to us, their peers. I was a woman who later had her own disabled child, who could join his peers for the battles fought and won by the older members of my generation, and whose rights I guarded with every care.

I was a Catholic child who grew up when divorce was severely frowned upon and annulments were difficult, if not impossible, to attain, to the pain of many, a grandmother included. I was a woman who was granted in an annulment and spared that pain. I learned institutions are organic and can change for the rightful good of their members. I learned members can help make that happen.

I was a 10-year-old girl who watched a brother die of leukemia when there was no hope for survival, and no hospice to help through that year of anguish. I was a young woman who understood why it was so important when hospice finally arrived in the U.S. I am now an older woman who continues working in hospice, because it matters.

A single descriptor like “quaint” can be weaponized to diminish a whole group of people, to the detriment of all groups of people. Intact within me are all the ages I have been, that make for a rich and complex expression of the evolving, organic person I am. I am not static because I am no longer young; I am richer because I was once young — and I will grow richer still.