Change. There are few things harder for humans to deal with than change. Whether in their personal lives or professional lives, we are fearful and suspicious of change. We like the status quo because we know what that is, but change means moving into the unknown, and that is traumatic for most of us. We have a comfort zone. It’s based on many things; our religious teachings; our family culture and beliefs, and on our perceptions of society and change based on both those teachings, and the urban legends that we’ve absorbed; it’s seldom based on personal experience.
President Obama - from Wikipedia Photos
So it is with our society. We elected a president who promised change. Those of us excited by this promise are now protesting that change is coming too slow, or not at all. Others, opposed to change, are wailing that he is a socialist, and calling him any manner of names meant to distract and derail his efforts to bring much need change to a country dominated by big money and bigotry.
Change is supposed to be difficult. We humans have a built-in mechanism that resists change, and with good reason. While the slow process of change may be frustrating for those of us who are anxious to see a better future, the resistance to change protects us from utter chaos.
Imagine if you will, that every time we elected a new president, or a new majority in congress, that everyone could turn our system upside down in an instant to meet their view of the world with no one questioning either their motives, or the results. We’d be in constant turmoil, embroiled in the massive cost and time consumption of changing huge sections of our government and society, possibly every two years. We would get even less done than we do now because all of our resources would be consumed within a state of constant change. And, we could very well end up in total collapse depending on the changes that were pushed through.
Think of it as government by personality, a term we often used when I was at Boeing, substituting the word management for government. Every time we changed the person in the White House, or at the top of an organization in business, they would throw out everything that came before them and remake our government into whatever vision, or nightmare possessed them, with no one questioning the benefits of the change. When you’re in a state of constant change, there’s precious little time to accomplish anything.
Old Senate Debate - Wikipedia Photos
As difficult as it is to suffer through the speeches, the spinning of information, and the deal-making in back rooms, this process is meant to weed out the bad ideas from the good with the hope that the best ideas will make it through the filter of doubt and debate to produce a greater country. It is tantamount to test marketing new products, or a motion picture. The item is released into limited and selected markets to see if the public will buy the item or watch the movie. If it’s successful, then it’s released nation-wide. If it stumbles or fails, then it’s back to the drawing board to improve the idea, or to scrap it altogether. This godawful process we use for changing our country is very much the same. Consider it social evolution, and survival of the fittest.
KKK teaching children to hate
We’ve gone through this process since the beginning of our nation, as has the entire world since the beginning of time. Recall the difficulty of getting women the right to vote, or equal rights for African Americans. The debate raged on both sides of the issue. The opponents to these changes raised great fears; they quoted passages from religious books to try to prove their point, and predicted the end of our democracy.
While their arguments look absurd today, at the time, it held to the light of public scrutiny what were for many people their heartfelt beliefs. That airing of opinions, even wrong-headed opinions, helped shine the light of humanity and truth on a darker side of our national personality. The end result, after much agony, was our nation moving to a better place where equality for all became more than words on a document, it became the law of the land.
Today, we wrestle with two major social issues, healthcare reform with a public option, and allowing gays to serve opening in our military. Both ideas, in my opinion, are the right thing to do, just as civil rights and women’s rights were the moral thing to do.
In the healthcare debate, we have the conservatives on one side, arguing against change, partly out of fear, and partly because
The Great Debate - Wikipedia Photos
many are recipients of large sums of money from the companies reaping huge monetary rewards from the current system; this is not unusual. During the struggle against slavery in the 1800s, there was a lot of money being made through the use of slaves in the tobacco and cotton industry, and this money was used to fight the abolitionists.
A Decorated Gay Vietnam Veteran
Similarly, as our nation confronts the discrimination against gays in the military, those opposed trot out frightening scenarios of homosexuals sharing facilities with straight soldiers, and quote biblical passages in an effort to discredit reform. The arguments against equal rights for women and black people were couched in the same kind of fear-mongering terms. In the end, our nation saw the fallacy of these arguments, and today we’re much closer to a nation of equal rights for all.
Still, this glacial process of change toward freedom for those in slavery, and for women’s rights, had to have been agonizing for those championing civil rights. Common sense told them it was the right thing to do, but they could only wait for the differing factions to air their difference, and hope that right would win, and it did.
I believe that the debates we’re having today on healthcare and gays in the military are right now in the crucible of truth where ideas, good and bad, are debated and the flaws on each side are shown in their worst light, and the good ideas in their best light.
For those of us who know that both universal healthcare and equal rights for gay people are the right thing to do, we find it difficult to tolerate the opposition, and the time it takes to bring about change, but it must be done, and when it is, we’ll be a better and stronger country for having gone through the process.
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