Unless you’ve been living in North Korea or inside a geode (how you managed to get into a tiny hollow rock lined with crystals is beyond me), you must’ve heard all the glorious news that the USA legalised same-sex marriage nationwide. Congratulations America! Yes, you may have not grasped the concept of gun control like Australia but it’s great to see that Congress no longer has a reason to vomit after seeing rainbow-coloured flags. Of course, Australia still hasn’t taken the LGBT agenda seriously thanks to Tony Abbott’s phobia of the 21st century so that’s definitely a point for the USA in that case. Now if you haven’t heard about all this, you’ve definitely seen it. Almost everyone on Facebook has used a mysterious function to overlay rainbows on their profile pics, and for you WordPress bloggers out there, it seems the Nyan Cat has been running left and right across the blue toolbar at the top of your screens. Plus, every news network not interested in terrorist bombings has massive features dedicated to the rainbow movement that has triumphed in George Washington’s stomping ground. Again, well done America, but I still want you to make tax and mandatory tips inclusive in your prices at restaurants. Now I have nothing against the ruling of this Supreme Court decision. I’m not aware of any lethal zombie-turning disease that only affects LGBT supporters so go ahead, get married. One could argue this is a good thing because with the world population rising at an incredible rate, not forcing people to only marry someone of the other gender might dent that birth rate increase. A weak argument of course, but I didn’t suggest that one in the first place, just as I wasn’t the first to realise how terrible Terminator Salvation was, so Genisys had better do better for goodness’ sake. So, end of story. America now allows same-sex marriage not long after Ireland escaped being erased from existence by the gods. The ball is rolling even more for other countries to adopt the same laws (Uganda might be a problem). Fin.
But I’m still here, so what else do I intend to talk about? Well, many people like to use the term “social progress” to describe how global culture and attitudes have developed over time. Such a “progressive society” adopts these evolutions in thinking because they are improvements over previous ways. Nothing wrong there, although it’s sometimes rather dubious what an improvement is. I’m sure killing off the Jews isn’t progressive but Mr. Hitler and his nasty Nazis thought so. Yes, there are Holocaust deniers out there but our progressive society that sort of believes in free speech has decided that these deniers are lawbreakers. Okay yeah, Holocaust denial is nonsense and definitely should be eradicated but you get what I meant about the mystery of improvement in society is. Understanding how a society works is nightmarish even at first glance. I spend a lot of time wondering how this society operates in order to understand my place in it – and so far, I’ve determined I’m actually in another universe at the fringes of modern society. Now it’s fair to say that this growing acceptance of the LGBT community is progressive. Looking at it now, it looks blatantly obvious that there shouldn’t have been such a divide. They’re humans like everyone else (although there are some people I know who might actually be early Soviet androids in disguise) so what’s the problem? Only a few decades ago, being gay was punishable and very taboo. If you’ve seen The Imitation Game or read up on the life story of World War II code-cracker Alan Turing, his career and world was ruined when he was prosecuted for being a homosexual in 1952. That wouldn’t happen today, but even that statement I made right now is actually slightly false. Yes, we’re more supportive of lesbians and the like but there’s going to be quite a lot of us who still harbour a semi-conscious instinctive fear or hatred of the LGBT movement. Even though there’s virtually no threat from them except having your house completely painted in rainbows without your permission, all those years of living lives where the “queers” were to be avoided are still partly hardwired in our heads. Hell, I’m betting many of you say to your friends, “Heck yeah! A toast to the rainbows!” and will even know that there’s nothing wrong with brushing shoulders with our mutual LGBT community, but most of you will have some lingering apprehension and possibly take one step away from them. Do you know what I mean? We are a progressive society but only on the surface for the most part. A long history of anti-gay beliefs is hard to shrug off for those who were brought up in those days.
This isn’t an exclusive issue to the LGBT movement and rainbow marriages. If you ask me, all of our big social issues arise from hardwired histories that are only seriously getting some overturning today. Race is a great example. Remember segregation in the USA, the Aborigines’ lack of identity in Australia and South Africa’s apartheid regime? Those laws and stuff are effectively gone now, but we still have racism problems today. Why? It’s not in any constitution I know of to go around and scream “Nigger!” at black-skinned people. Even though we are supposedly more accepting of the mixing of the races, some invisible force compels the whites to classify the blacks as filthy while the blacks themselves think of the whites as the rick kids who can’t play basketball, and this all happens while the Chinese are expected to be good at maths. There’re a lot of stereotypes associated with each race and technically they aren’t true but so many years of racial division has imprinted these ideas into almost every such that they in some degree fulfil these false expectations. Another great example of superficial social progress is gender equality. This is a very brutal battlefield of wits and squabbling filled with feminists and… uh, anti-feminists? I don’t know. Whatever, there’s a building push to give women the same opportunities as men. You know the drill. In the long, long past, it was the lady who sat like a good wife at home to do the knitting while the gentleman would make the money and be recognised for DNA sequencing. We’d like to think that’s not the case anymore, and sure enough that’s partially true. Women now work real paying jobs and men are adopting traditionally wifely duties, albeit some of them still fail at cooking a simple meal. However, thanks to that innate part of our minds that’s been conditioned to put the man at a higher level than the woman, we still have wage gaps, job imbalances, and just general views of women being somehow inferior. The gender equality debate is an absolute mess and even trying to get into it will guarantee a quick death. In some ways, the issue has given women more power in cases of sexual harassment. Given that men traditionally got away with it, the gender equality problem has unexpectedly given the girl more power in such claims. I recall reading Disclosure by Michael Crichton whose plot revolves around a man accused of sexually harassing his boss, a former girlfriend, even though it was actually the boss’ doing, but thanks to girl power the man is destined to lose the case unless he finds some unobjectionable evidence to prove he wasn’t at fault. Clearly the gender battle is much more rickety than some other social issues but what I’m trying to get here is that these problems are things our progressive society is working to eliminate even though our global history has imprinted the old beliefs into our brains and trying to change them takes a lot more than social progression.
Where does that leave our vision of a progressive society? On the whole, it looks like we as a collective are working to some greater good, the dream that everyone can live equal lives without discrimination or hatred. That’s a good thing, but thanks to the past, our minds will remain under its influence passively. We’ll all chant in support of rainbows but many of us will still look down judgingly on same-sex marriage. We’ll say we’re friends with our African-American and Asian entourage, but that doesn’t stop a steady stream of instinctive racism that some will try to cover up as harmless jokes when they weren’t intended to be such. We’ll let more girls into jobs but the little man from the ‘50s in our neurons will sway the job promotions to men. It doesn’t matter how much society moves on, it’s a question of how many people will be able to forget those old ways and move with the times. Essentially, what I’m concluding is that no matter how far we progress, these outdated thoughts will persist in almost all of us and may threaten the progressive ways we claim to support. In fact, if you really want total turns of thought, it takes a massive disaster that kills millions to bring about the shift needed, either by complete shock or wiping out those who can’t completely change. An asteroid would do the trick, though I’d rather not want to die from that. Nor do you I hope.
Matters of Opinion 