The Big Picture

To be clear, I’m not saying the world was perfect in the second half of the 20th century. Obviously those years saw plenty of war and injustice. Broadly speaking, though, I think it’s safe to say that social conditions improved for many thanks to the civil rights movement and countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and the gay rights movement that continued well beyond those decades. The larger point that’s been on my mind is how long humans struggled under these power imbalances, and how some of those inequities were overcome only very recently. Which is why it’s infuriating to me to see pseudoscientific reactionaries who want to turn back the clock treated like brilliant philosophers with fresh new ideas. 

In the grand scheme of things, it seems weird that the advancement of marginalized groups would be denigrated as “politically correct” when these changes were extremely politically incorrect for most of human history. Personally, I feel lucky to have grown up in a time when many of today’s restrictive notions about gender norms were laughable.