It's been a rough year for me in 2018 but there's been a lot of good things too. I think that's something that all of us forget. That even though things are tough, that people suck, and that we might also have a long way to go, we should still acknowledge the progress we've made. Yes I do have a point and I'll get there eventually but just take a walk with me.
This is just as true when we discuss societal changes. There's a lot of groups pushing some very radical changes in America today. When I was a kid we were just getting over the largest changes in civil rights in history. Getting over is maybe a term that many would take issue with but I will submit that it might be le mot juste. Even when all of these changes are right and correct there's a huge amount of existential exhaustion that takes some time. Remember that the Civil Rights movement from the second World War to 1970 was at best only halfway a success. Sure there were huge inroads, and many outright triumphs, but people still sometimes ended up “strange fruit” here in the south.
That kind of change takes a lot out of the society. It also takes a generation for the society to integrate those changes. This might be even more true when things are sorely needed. When everyone knows that the fight is coming and they just want to get it over with. I think that this is part of the problems with our society today. Even if liberals are right, and I'm sure they are about many things, our society is exhausted and we need to take a generation to rest and recover. Let's face that our children are going to do what they want anyway, and trying to enforce our will upon the future is probably as futile a struggle as we've ever seen. That's a larger issue and probably the subject of a different essay so we should leave that alone.
Anyway by about 1972 things were going so well in the Civil Rights movement that everyone decided that Women's Liberation should be handled next. By the way, the previous statement was irony and extreme sarcasm. Any other interpretation is completely facetious. The Civil Rights movement was eclipsed by the “dumpster fire” that was the end of the Vietnam War. Watergate came soon after and America was shaken to its very foundation. It's hard to explain to anyone who wasn't alive back then just how scared a lot of people were. I think we were much closer to a violent insurrection in America than anyone talks about now. Had there been anything like social media in those days there probably would have been. It was a scary time for America.
In the late 60s and early 70s we went from the Civil Rights movement to Women's Liberation with only a crisis to separate them. I think that's why so many people think so fondly of Ronald Reagan. Ronnie was safe and paternal. He wasn't going to let women and brown people take anything from decent white guys. So we created the global drug trade and simultaneously continued Nixon's egregious anti-drug policies in order to incarcerate an entire generation of black men. This gutted the Civil Rights movement and left only the Women's Liberation movement for people to deal with. The women’s movement took a break, but not consciously and not for no reason. A legion of women were attending colleges and building careers they couldn't before, so their daughters could do even better. America was getting over the idea of women as second class citizens. Women were running for office and even if they didn't win as much as they should, people got used to the idea that candidates weren't always men. Women eventually started again and “Women's Liberation” became “Equality”. That word was a lot easier to deal with and progress continued. Not at a pace many women felt was quick enough, but progress was made.
Brown people and Women were competing for space in the public consciousness. I'm not sure how black women felt, but it's probably not as good as the others did. So while there was progress it wasn't something that anyone was happy with. I'm just some guy but I thought any progress was greater than none. Even though we might not all hold hands and sing “Kum ba Yah” some change is still better than none. Gradual improvement works. About the time that things started to move again the LGBT community jumped in and started their quest for equality. Now America has a huge problem with gay people, probably even a bigger problem than they have with brown people or women people, no doubt because of our Puritan roots. Everybody tells you in school that the pilgrims came to America fleeing religious oppression. What they don't tell you is that the pilgrims were the oppressors. Most of Europe threw them out rather than deal with their petty exclusionary views on everything. The whole myth about Thanksgiving was actually a metaphor for putting America back together during Reconstruction. Anyway I'm digressing again so let me get back to my point.
The playing field got really crowded and there were a lot of groups moving in different directions. All of them wanted equality but most of them weren't interested in sharing the stage with anybody else. Now I get that women deserve to have women's issues, and that brown people deserve to have their issues, and that LGBT people get to have their issues too, but I don't understand why they can't all have the same issues. Every single person that you know deserves to be treated equally. There are no exceptions to this. Even though we might feel differently about certain issues, we all need to realize that we have more in common than any supposed differences that separate us.
Oh, by the way, before anybody decides to burn me in effigy, the reason I say brown people is because what I'm talking about is “not white people” and all of the myriad issues surrounding them. There's a whole lot of those issues and almost all of them are valid. That's hard to swallow for many people but I don't think that makes it any less true.
The recovery community is like that as well. A great many of us feel like we're different than others. Many of us feel like the “Recovery Police” are going to show up any minute and tell everyone that we're frauds. That we don't belong in the real community, with the real addicts. At the end of the day, once we really surrender, we realize that all of the differences we saw are actually the things that bind us together. Each of us had or has our own addiction and our own issues and each of us can use tools to deal with those stresses and situations. Many if not most will use a 12 step program. Others may use a program like Rational Recovery or SmartRecovery. Some might need a fellowship, others might need a therapist, and a few might even be able to do it alone. No, I've never met anyone who's gone solo, but I'm sure it's happened at some point in the past. Still, all of us humans need to stop trying so damnedably hard to be so sensitive and hurt all the time.
To paraphrase some other people; none of us are beautiful or unique snowflakes. Even if we were snowflakes guess what, we still have more in common with each other than we do separately. If you think you are one in a million that's awesome, but there's still about 7,000 idiots on this planet just like you. Stop overreacting. Yes we all have a long way to go separately and as a society, but we can't forget how far we've come. Yes it's probably going to take a generation or two for racial equality. Maybe a little more for gender equality. Even longer than that for gender identity and issues of sexuality but damn it, we've come a long way. We went from Selma to the White House in a little more than 40 years. That's amazing. Women have come as far but not as fast. Hell, gay people were institutionalised as recently as twenty years ago. We've come too far and worked too hard to let some people (who think we possibly haven't tried hard enough) to ignore everything.
I'm going to spend the next month or two celebrating just how far we've come. For the next two months I’ll also focus on being inclusive. Who knows, it may become a habit and maybe I'll just do it for the rest of my life.
After all, we’re all in this together, and nobody gets out of here alive!
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