So I was thinking more on how I don’t think things change, no matter who is in power, or how things change and then go straight back when the ‘other guys’ get in power.
And I can hear a voice in the back of my head saying ‘what about gay rights and feminism and racial relations?’
Well, what about them?
It’s been 44 years since the Stonewall Riots in New York began the gay rights movement. A number I can easily remember as it is the same year I was born, 1969. And we are still fighting for gay rights. Right to marry. To adopt. To just have the same rights as someone who is born with the ability and desire to love the opposite rather than the same sex.
And feminism. It’s been about 50 years since that started. Do women get equal pay? How many female members of Congress are there? Members of Parliament? CEOs? Presidents of the United States have there been?
Race? It was 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of that bus. Has Dr King’s dream come true? Do ‘…all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics,…’ ‘…join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”‘
Do they?
Or did I have to find an alternate route to my son’s school on Monday because the road was closed due to a Security Alert triggered by a suspicious package on a railway bridge between our house and his school?
So don’t tell me change happens or stays or keeps. Don’t tell me, as I read in an article where New York Irish Pub owners defended the name of a drink called an Irish Car Bomb because ‘the troubles were so long ago, they are practically forgotten’, that the world is better or safer or evener or equalier than it was before.
Tell it to the gang rape victim in Delhi. Or the teenager who was raped by footballers, where that the whole town tried to cover it up in the US.
The world is unequal and uneven and unfair. And how will we know it no longer is?
People won’t know or need the term ‘White Privilege.’ We won ‘t need International Women’s Day. We won’t need Gay Pride. Or Black Pride Month. Or a million other things that we need to do, and do loudly, to be heard.
It’s been half a century since most of this stuff started.
When is going to end?
Great essay and how sadly true.