I wanna talk about Generational thinking.
There are folks who think that all you have to do is wait for all the Old Bigots to die off, and things will Get Better. I’ve seen it said by Alphas about Gen X; I’ve seen Millenials say it about Boomers, I saw Gen-Xers say it about the Silent Generation.
It doesn’t work. It doesn’t stick.
Well, for starters, these Generations are not monoliths. The conversation of Egalitarianism vs Elitism is a very, very old argument, and there have always been people fighting on both sides.
Let me tell you about My Family.
My Father was solidly Boomer, born 1950. He was a blond haired, blue eyed white guy; born to a military family in a freshly conquered pacific territory.
His treatment by the Catholic nuns in his school days (beatings daily, for being Sinister, or Left-handed, which in those days was taken as unambiguous proof that Evil Forces lurked in your soul) would instill in him a permanent anti-authoritarian streak that would define his entire life.
When Washington moved them to the racially charged South in the 60s, he wound up with a reputation for being very nice to the Black Kids, and for possessing a powerful southpaw uppercut that he liked to use to disprove the “Supremacy” of Racists.
When he moved to California in the 70s, he learned Chinese, and then Vietnamese, and made it a point to be known to those in his vicinity that anyone who wanted to be was an American, no matter how thick their accent.
But, as he aged, he stopped keeping up with the world. He retreated into the Internet. He began listening to Men’s Rights Activists and Conspiracy Theorists. If you’d met him only when he was old, you would have no idea that he’d once been the type to punch Nazis in the face.
He’d believed that he was Too Cool to become one of the Bad Guys.
My Mother’s Mother was a Nurse.
She worked for Planned Parenthood. From the 1970s up through the late 90s, over 30 years, she provided women of all colors, ages, and classes medical care and information that helped them secure their reproductive rights and freedoms.
She would no doubt be cancelled in online leftist spaces today, if I managed to summon her ghost to run a keyboard: she didn’t much care for homosexuals, and had never unpacked what was wrong with American History.
But for 3 decades, what she did with her time and her energy and her professional acumen was ensure that Women got the medical care they needed to secure their Reproductive Freedom. Rich and Poor, black and white. Even into retirement, unto her death, she was volunteering time to talk to teens about Sex Ed.
She was Silent Generation. Born in the 30s.
My Father’s Mother was a Storyteller. She’d been a schoolteacher in her working days, and she had an ability to talk to children and get them to open up to her that impressive to watch. She collected Stories everywhere she went, and liked to volunteer to tell stories to children in libraries.
Her collection was very heavy on the myths and legends of Native Americans. She went into white Christian neighborhoods and filled the heads of the children there with tales of Skywoman and Emergence Tunnels; of Coyote and Crow; tales where the moral of the story was about being Respectful citizens of the Web of Life.
You gotta get ‘em young, she’d say.
She scrounged around the southwest, in estate sales and flea markets, looking for pieces of Art and Craft that belonged to the displaced Natives, and getting them in the hands of Heritage Collections, Schools, and Museums.
She encouraged her children and grandchildren to make friends of many kinds, and when my cousins married outside of our race, grandmother was the fastest and loudest about welcoming them into our Family; about calling them Family.
When she passed, the world became a little more racist, not less.
I have journal entries and stories that go back farther still.
I have a story about an ancestor, who, when presented with orders to displace the Cherokee, chose to hobble his commanding officer instead.
I have a story about a pair of brothers buried out in Kansas City, who’d fought next to Negroes in the Civil War and drawn pistols in defense of them in the times afterwards.
We’ve always been here: those with our eyes on the future. Those who want to leave this world better than we found it. Those who Object.
So, why does Bigotry persist? From whence Racism and Sexism and Fear of the Other?
Ignorance. Failure to Educate. The propaganda of those with nefarious goals and too much money. It is a thing which will sprout, like a weed, from the rich soil of desperate, ignorant people who seek easy and external answers to the question of “why do I suffer?” It is a thing which must be continuously fought against.
If no one ever told you that the earth goes around the sun, what would the evidence of your senses tell you? Without Education from Elders, we are left only with the limited experience of our own lives. Bigotry is an easy story to arrive at. It takes travel and experience to inoculate oneself against it; requires time spent amongst Others, expanding your worldview, to prevent it sprouting spontaneously from lived experience.
You cannot just wait for Bigotry to die off.
Some of the Elders are ones who fought to make it better, and without Elders, the Young will make the same mistakes. The wheel turns. Society is never Finished. It is never Complete.
But, if you are young, remember;
You can’t wait for the Old to die off. You must begin fighting now. Remember to keep some eyes on your flanks; the next generation of Bigots is growing up right next to you. You are not immune. That said:
You are not alone in this.
A lot of your Elders are already fighting on your behalf, and we will not let this current crop of assholes undo all of our fucking work!
Let us help you! We want to help you!
You’re who we did all this work for, after all.
snowghoul
janainaart
ellievsbear
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
