4 May 2024
I saw a meme that showed the Wright brothers on the left and the landing on the moon on the right. 66 years apart. I was thinking the other night about all the transitions I have witnessed in my sixtyish years on earth. It is hard to not think of this stuff without adding a bit of social commentary along the way—as is my bent.
In not so chronological order:
In the 1960’s when I was born it was very much a buck-up society. My school had a lot of new teachers so some new ideas were entering the schools. One such was the idea that learning disabilities were not equivalent to stupid. My best friend was held back in the second grade, that was the only response to a learning disability the schools had then. But a new idea was entering thought, identifying a learning disability to at least understand where the problem may have come from. He has dyslexia. This means he reads really slowly. All the rage in the 60s was the IQ test (which I have always called reading speed tests). They have been thoroughly debunked on cultural bias grounds since. A kid with dyslexia, by necessity, is a slow reader if they wish to get any answers right. So, they don’t finish the test, you have a low score, you are, by definition, a moron, or one of several other designated labels of stupid from the literature on IQ testing of the day. Now we have entire schools designed for dyslexic kids, there is one in Vancouver Canada. There are now many learning disabilities and help for them available. IQ tests are no longer given—although some have just changed the name, I am sure. The categories of stupid that went along with IQ testing are now unspeakable. Although I disagree, on principle, to the ‘unspeakable’ part I completely agree with not labeling people. An aside: we now use different labels to brand children—but we have drugs for those.
Mainstreaming: This is the idea, beginning in the 70’s I think, of taking children with mental health challenges and not putting them in special schools. Also, clearing mental health institutions. The idea was to mainstream mental health back into society so they could become members of society instead of locked up in separate schools and institutions and the society would, in the theory, become more accepting. One side, as I have described it, sounds like a humanitarian exercise. But the downside was that no support systems for them were added to help when mainstreamed. Schools got very few extra helpers for mainstreamed kids resulting in many teachers having to deal with a mentally challenged student and thus neglecting the other children. The other group of institutionalized people often ended up being homeless with no public help at all. Basically, mental health care was ‘provided’ by police and a small number of volunteer organizations. This trend is moving back the other way, a little progress has been made on support systems in some areas. It must be stated that the problems here are extremely complicated. Lots of nuance is needed. People need to be met at their level of need. Our society so far does not want to face this, is afraid of labeling and getting sued, does not want to pay the cost, and the bureaucracy cannot deal well with individual needs.
Victim status: I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. There was a transition that happened from the protest movements of the era: the new goal – victim status. The society began to change from a melting pot to a mosaic, except the mosaic has become more like a scrap heap of disparate parts with a lost overarching theme. Today this has finally encompassed everyone with Trump promoting white men as victims. White men have glommed on to this concept felling power slipping since the civil rights act of 1964. There are many reasons why some groups have a harder time than others from some perspectives and easier than others from other perspectives. I suggest with many groups this has more to do with hyper focus than with general victimization. I believe blacks and women have the most reason to feel the-victim and white men have almost none at all. Many groups that feel the-victim are so small in society that the society could never make general laws to remove what they perceive as victimization. The only way to fix the latter situation is to change the mentality of the populous. Making laws against thought only creates resentment and more victimization. Life, people, personalities, society, norms are all complicated though victimization usually is expressed as a black or white concept and thus not something government or societies can fix by making rules.
Divorce became common: Divorce has always happened. Every society had some way to divorce. There were also consequences that were typically against the women. In my history my great grandparents were divorced, my parents were divorced, and I am divorced. In the past divorced men were not allowed to hold positions in some churches (women not allowed because they were women). Women, well into the 1970s were not able to get mortgages themselves (my mom had to assume someone else’s mortgage with her parents’ guarantee). The society had no understanding of kids of divorced parents and the parents had no language to discuss with kids what was happening. Roughly half of all marriages end in divorce. Fewer people are getting married but divorce is roughly the same, married or not, especially for kids. I think women get the worst of this. I also think kids, though they ‘handle’ it and are incredibly durable are unable to understand, have the words for, or communicate how these broken relationships effect every other relationship they have for the rest of their lives—this from personal experience.
Then there are the men. My generation, rightly or wrongly, were taught, or one could say, expected, to provide for their families while the women did the chores and raised the kids–very father-knows-best. In the seventies this began to change as women’s rights began to be discussed. When my generation had kids, we did more, well some more, than our fathers did. Interesting when the stay-at-home-dad became a thing, they were outcasts by the stay-at-home moms. This transition was slow, I think. I am not sure the idea ever caught on as now almost every couple has both parents working. I don’t think this is a good solution but with the cost of living, I am not sure there is another way.
Computers: Not a lot to say about computers. I could say much more about screens in general. I have said a fair bit in other places. We are all much better at trivia now. We believe everyone is entitled to hear our opinions, even those we do not actually know. In one sense screens are good at helping people who normally would not express themselves, in another, we are becoming unimaginative in our ways of written expression since the computer suggests just about everything. Now we have AI which as yet is still part of the computer transition.
Cell phones: again, we are now very good at trivia. We also are losing memory skills and of the course the practical skill of ready maps. We can now work 24/7 and in many jobs are assumed to do so. Do we actually keep closer touch with our kids?
These are interesting transitions. My grandmother, Pearl Blanche Cline (Nee Brown), has many more transitions. She was born August 1905 and died in April 2009. One hundred-three years of life and changes.
Some of her transitions.
Refrigeration: She told me when they first moved to Lynden keeping things cool was a matter of sticking them in the creek that ran through the back yard. The meat was preserved by sticking it in vats of pig lard. They eventually had a white gas refrigerator before getting into electricity.
Flight. The wright brothers flew for the fist time in 1903. I do not know if my grandmother was ever in a plane in here life. All the trips I know they took they drove.
Telephone, radio, television: The Brown family had the first telephone on the Badger Road. People would come in and use it from around the area. Radio came to life in the 30’s. My mom told me she used to babysit at places that had TVs so she could watch, that would have been the 50’s.
Wars to end all wars: My grandfather was in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, luckily, he joined in 1918 and so never got deployed before the war ended. My grandma’s brothers were in WWII, but none died there. A few of her brothers-in-law did. She had a nephew in Korea and son-in-law in Vietnam. Wars to end all wars.
Cars: She told me that my great grandfather would take the horse and wagon to town in Lynden to buy sacks of flower and other supplies they could not grow themselves. I know she said they used to drive model Ts on Wiser Lake when it froze over.
There are more transitions, technological and social that could be explored. I just found this interesting when I thought of it.
Hark 