WHAT YOU CAN DO

Signs of progress (and not)

Over the last twenty or thirty years, new attitudes about gay rights,
smoking, drinking, guns, animal rights, vegetarianism, etc. have come
into the mainstream. But there hasn’t really been a strong
transformation in other areas.

It’s a much more civilized society than it was thirty years ago.
Plenty of crazy stuff goes on, but in general, there’s an overall
improvement in the level of tolerance and understanding in this
country, a much broader recognition of the rights of other people,
of diversity, of the need to recognize oppressive acts that you
yourself have been involved in.
There’s no more dramatic illustration of that than the attitude
towards the original sin of American society—the elimination of the
native population. The founding fathers sometimes condemned it,
usually long after their own involvement, but from then to the
1960s, it was hardly mentioned.
When I grew up, we played cowboys and Indians (and I was
supposed to be some kind of young radical). My children certainly
wouldn’t have played like that, and obviously my grandchildren don’t.
Looking at the timing, I suspect that a lot of the hysteria about
political correctness was whipped up out of frustration over the
fact that it wasn’t going to be possible, in 1992, to have the kind of
500th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ landing in the New
World you could have had thirty years earlier. There’s much more
understanding today of what actually took place.
I’m not saying things are great now, but they are much better, in
virtually every area. In the 1700s, the way people treated each
other was an unbelievable horror. A century ago, workers’ rights in
the US were violently repressed.
Even fifty years ago, things were pretty bad. Repression of
blacks in the South was obscene. Options for women were highly
restricted. There was plenty of upper-class antisemitism too.