A witness to change

I was born in 1941, into a world shaped by hard work, firm expectations and the steady belief that effort, character and preparation would secure one’s place in society. My father was a man of discipline and quiet pride. He taught me that work was more than a means of earning a living. It was a measure of one’s integrity. He also taught me something I have carried my entire life: A man is his own most valuable enterprise. No institution, no employer, no title would ever invest in you the way you must invest in yourself. In his generation, a man’s word, his consistency and his willingness to labor carried weight. There was an understanding — spoken and unspoken — that stability could be built through perseverance and responsibility, but that it was your responsibility to build it. 

Over the course of my lifetime, I have watched that sense of stability tested more than once. 

As a younger man, I witnessed the early signs of economic displacement in  communities that had depended on industrial labor for generations. Jobs that once sustained entire families began to shift, shrink or disappear altogether. Workers who had given decades of loyalty found themselves facing an unfamiliar uncertainty, not because they had failed, but because the economy beneath them was changing. Many sensed it before they could name it. The steadiness they had been promised was quietly eroding. 

What followed was more severe. Factories that had anchored towns and cities shut their doors entirely. Plants closed. Signs went up. Here in Macon, we witnessed it firsthand when Brown and Williamson — once the city’s largest employer, providing thousands of families with steady, well paying work — consolidated its operations and left. The jobs left with it. The building sat vacant for years, a quiet reminder of what happens when an entire community’s livelihood is tied to a single institution. Skilled men and women who had done everything asked of them were told to retrain or adapt, but the pathways were often unclear and the support insufficient. Too many had entrusted their futures entirely to the companies they served, and when those companies no longer needed them, they had no plan of their own to fall back on. 

Later, I saw another transformation take hold as offices, institutions and workplaces shifted from paper to computers, from physical processes to digital systems, from manual routines to knowledge-based work. The Information Age altered how organizations functioned, how decisions were made, and how quickly the pace of work accelerated. Entire professions evolved. Expectations changed. Credentials became more important, and education took on new meaning as the gateway to opportunity. Those who recognized early that they needed to continuously develop themselves  rather than wait for an employer or a program to do it for them, were the ones who navigated that transition most successfully. 

Most recently, I watched as the pandemic disrupted nearly every aspect of daily life. Work moved from offices to homes. Meetings moved from conference rooms to computer screens. Systems that once seemed immovable shifted almost overnight. In that period, it became clear to me that the speed of change in our society has increased dramatically. What once unfolded over decades can now occur in a matter of years or even months. And in those months, the individuals who had already taken ownership of their own growth, sharpened their skills, broadened their understanding and refused to become comfortable, weathered the disruption best. 

I do not claim to understand every new technology or emerging system. However, I recognize patterns. I have seen what happens when economic progress moves faster than people’s ability to prepare for it. I have seen what happens when workers, families and communities are caught off guard by change that was not adequately explained, anticipated or managed. And I have seen, time and again, that the people who survive these shifts are the ones who understood that no one was coming to save them. The responsibility to prepare, to grow, to adapt, belonged to them first.

In earlier years, it was blue-collar and industrial workers who felt the impact of economic transition most severely. Today, it is becoming  increasingly apparent that professionals, office workers and even those with advanced degrees may face similar uncertainty. The coming transformation, driven by automation and advanced technologies, has the potential to move more quickly and reach more broadly than any we have experienced before. 

Progress, when guided wisely, can improve lives. When handled carelessly,  it can leave good people behind. 

My hope is not that we resist change, but that we prepare for it more thoughtfully than we have in the past. The next generation deserves clearer guidance, stronger tools, and a deeper emphasis on adaptability, critical thinking and sound judgment. But above all, they must be taught to take ownership of their own development; to see themselves as something worth investing in, continuously and deliberately. We must ensure that  advancement serves people, but people must also be willing to serve their own potential. 

I have faith that there are leaders, educators and community builders who understand the responsibility of this moment. If we learn from history, remain attentive to the warning signs and invest in the development of human potential, we can move forward with confidence rather than fear. 

Change is inevitable. Being unprepared does not have to be.

Samuel Hart, Sr. is the executive director of the Middle GA Center for Academic Excellence.