Change and "Never!"

The past and the future are like the earth’s tectonic plates, grinding against one another with infinite slowness. Their resulting motion is change.

Humans resist change, probably as a safety measure to prevent us from being like a runaway train. But the overwhelming chorus of “Never!” whenever some major change is proposed is as inevitable as it is incomprehensible once the change in question has come about.

Slavery, the vote for women, integration: how much screaming and yelling and digging-in-of-heels…not to mention bloodshed and terrible suffering…went on before the change finally arrived? And how many today can understand what all the fuss was about? The same is true of technology, though generally to a lesser degree, and certainly without the same level of violence. Technological change is accepted a bit more readily, mainly because technology generally improves our individual lives. But even they are not without their vociferous detractors. The automobile (“Get a horse!”) and the airplane (“If God had intended for men to fly, he’d have given us wings!”) are just two examples.

One of the only certainties in life is that it will change, and there are three ways we all deal with it: welcome it, fight it tooth and nail, or simply go along with it. Like most things, if Change were a sliding scale between total acceptance and total rejection, most people would fall somewhere toward the middle, and while we each tend to maintain a certain place on the scale, almost no one is consistent in their reaction.

I find myself pretty far along the “resist” side of the scale. I don’t, as you may have noticed, like change much, because to change means letting go of the past, and for me that is something not to be desired.

Just in my lifetime, there have been a couple truly monumental examples of change. John F. Kennedy became our first Catholic president. (“Never! He’ll be controlled by the pope.”) Now we have a black president. And some day we will have a woman president. (“Never! Never!”)

I myself have ridden city busses in the south when African-Americans—they were “coloreds” or “Negroes” (or worse) back then—were forced to sit in the rear, and interstate busses in which little African American children had to stand in the aisles even though seats next to whites were available. The armed forces did not even integrate “people of color” fully until WWII.

Women in the military were little more than secretaries in uniform as little as 30 years ago. That they might assume more active rolls in the military was unheard of. And that women might serve aboard a warship or be in combat situations was utterly, totally unthinkable. And now nobody gives either of these things a second thought.

And still, rather than look back to see what happened in the past to these monumental it’ll-never-happen changes, people STILL scream and holler and go apoplectic over allowing gays to serve openly. They use—sometimes with almost the identical words—the same utterly specious, idiotic excuses to ban gays as they used against African Americans and women. What do these people use for logic? Good Lord, you idiots, open your eyes! And those of us who realize that change is inevitable cannot merely sit back meekly and wait for it. We have to be brave enough to confront the nay-sayers. In our refusal to do so, we are all, straight and gay, still in the closet. All we have to do to get out is to open the door.

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