Moving From Right To Left

FIFTY YEARS AGO it was illegal to be homosexual in America. it was punishable b incarceration in a single occupancy prison cell. During my childhood, the nineteen sixties, if you really wanted to insult someone, you called him a "queer" or in our neighborhood "queer bait". I swear I had no idea what they were talking about until I was swell into my teens. It was all incomprehensible to me. I knew only that these words meant something that you most definitely did not want to be. Now, not only is homosexuality legal, gays and lesbians are out of the closet and standing at the alter, exchanging wedding vows with the blessing of the state if not the church. Societal attitudes about homosexuality have demonstrably liberalized. When social security was created in 1935, America's conservative community warned of a communist takeover, and accused FDR of taking orders from Moscow. Now, conservative seniors gladly deposit their monthly social security checks, just like the rest of us, and social security has properly been given with practically eliminating poverty among America's elderly. Once upon a time marijuana was associated with "reefer madness", was demonized and criminalized. now its once again legal in most of the country, and since the nineteen sixties generations have grown accustomed to using it, as many as forty million Americans use it regularly, with no proven ill effects, other than fast food weight gain, giggles, and maybe some cloudy memory loss, temporary. societal attitudes about marijuana have liberalized. These few examples are but a few of many which follow the same pattern; movement from conservative to liberal values, from right to left, from traditional to a more progressive culture. Compare women's clothing fashions over the past one hundred years or so. In the nineteen twenties women waded into the swimming pool fully clothed, from shoulders to ankles. The bikinis of the sixties were fr from revealing. now, the ladies show tits and ass cheeks galore, at the public pool, without consequences other than a stare or two here and there. it was in the nineteen twenties that dresses started being made to conform to a woman's curves, rather than baggily showing no contours. Now, the cat is entirely out of the sartorial sack. Skin is in, has been for a long time, and so will remain. there are, of course, conservative reactionary cultural backlashes, but these are inevitably temporary.Culture, and history moves from right to left, from traditional to progressive change in values, as new traditions supplant the old. if you are a traditionalist, you are by definition fighting a losing battle. Its a battle worth losing.