Only Time Will Tell

Time is too nebulous a concept for me to grasp sometimes.  I have no idea what happened 10 or 20 years ago, and so I anchor everything to where I lived or worked when such-and-such happened.  I have to check IMDB to remember how old my cat is, because we bought her the same day we saw the fourth “Die Hard” movie.  I've been in my current job for 16 years, and it amazes me how far we've come in that time.  When I started working here, everyone had dial-up internet, and cell phones were just starting to become common.  I remember the first year I worked here, the CEO declaring "no cell phones in the building" because he felt they were a distraction.  He'd never get away with that today, now that they're so ubiquitous.

New technology tends to make the old ways look barbaric within a few decades.  Look at all the memes making fun of cassette tapes and floppy disks, and that’s fairly recent technology in the grand scheme of things.  Once we've all had self-driving cars for 20 years, we'll look back and say, "People used to operate cars by hand?  How unsafe!"  Once we invent a healthy lab-grown meat that tastes good, and use it for a couple of decades, we'll wonder how we ever were so backwards as to slaughter living creatures.  The “I, Robot” movie jokes about how dangerous gasoline is going to seem someday.  Heck, if we all switched to Velcro shoes for a few years, laces would look absolutely antiquated.

Meanwhile, social progress just keeps going back and forth, ebbing and flowing like the tides.  If you keep looking to the past, you'll find eras where people were open-minded, then strict, then back again.  In some ways, homosexual activity was more acceptable in ancient Rome than it was 30 years ago.  As much as I like to see things change for the better in my lifetime, it's bittersweet because I know it's not permanent.  Maybe it'll be 100 years, maybe 1000, but gay marriage will eventually be illegal again.  Technological advancements are permanent, but social advancements have an expiration date.

So whenever I hear someone say they’re voting a certain way “for future generations,” I get a little skeptical.  It’s up to those future generations whether something stays a law, and all it takes is a resurgence of certain attitudes for society to take large steps backward.  At best, we can only vote to make things better for the next generation, and try to raise them in such a way that they continue to pay it forward to future generations.  But other people are having children too, and their backwards attitudes are also getting passed on.  Social justice is a war that can never be won by either side.

This feels like a lengthy introduction to a blog on a more specific subject, but really I'm just babbling.  Have a nice day!