An analogy, prompted by a couple of different threads

[redbird]

Someone was talking about her frustration in dealing with Baby Boomers who respond to a discussion of an ongoing social problem with "But I thought we'd fixed that" (as in, the respondent was surprised and disbelieving that it still happened).

It occurred to me that in some ways these recurrent problems are like a mutant virus: you got your flu shot in 1975, or even 2007, but that doesn't do much (if anything) to protect you from the flu in 2011. They lurk in various places in the society, and one of the things that helps them lurk is the belief that they don't exist anymore: if you walk into a doctor's office and they don't even think that it might be scarlet fever, they won't give you the appropriate medication. Getting rid of a specific sexually harassing boss or racist cop doesn't mean that the workplace as a whole is now free of that, or that the police department culture has been fixed and all the racists are off the force or have seen the error of their ways.

(Or maybe I'm posting too early in the morning. Links deliberately omitted.)

Comments

[tim]

I talked to someone the other day who was surprised that sexual harassment would still occur in a university. Like, at all. (I was giving a very abbreviated version of this.) He was at most 5 years older than me.

I'm not sure it has to do with age so much as personal experiences. Of course people who racism isn't directed at think there's no racism anymore.

[trinker]

Natural consequence of worldview management by the Ostrich Principle.

[jesse_the_k]

I like the analogy. Is the flu shot our advocacy?

[malka]

Nice analogy! I think it extends to puerperal fever.

"Doctors are gentlemen and so have inherently clean hands, so how dare you suggest that we should wash up between autopsies and live patients" <-> "I am a good person and so am inherently not racist/sexist/homophobic/etc, so how dare you suggest that I monitor my behavior for prejudice".

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Well and wisely said.

(I share the OP's frustration.)

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I think that's an excellent analogy, including that there are some kinds of specific advances, some kinds of behavior that don't happen anymore, just as smallpox is wiped out and there is almost no diphtheria, but someone who said "we've fixed disease" would be just horribly wrong. In fact, most people thought we'd fixed at least bacterial disease, and now the bacteria have started outwitting us--I'm not sure what the equivalent of that would be.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

The way that statements such as "there's no racism anymore" or "there's no sexism anymore" or "you're just being paranoid" often work to directly advance the bigotries whose nonexistence is being claimed, perhaps?

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Maybe--

The disease analogy I see as closest to those statements is that of the anti-vaccination people, some of whom actually say, "No one ever gets [diphtheria/whooping cough/polio/meningitis/fill-in-blank] anymore, so vaccination is unnecessary." One place even that analogy breaks down is that as long as we have herd immunity to rely on, those people are only endangering themselves and their children. They're getting us closer to losing herd immunity, but that's a tipping point, not an incremental issue as social oppression is.

[redbird]

If we take that analogy a bit further: you don't lose herd immunity all at once, you lose it in pockets, say a school or suburb where a lot of parents don't vaccinate, and either the outbreak can die off quickly, or some of the people from there can happen to visit someone else in a low-vaccination area. Back to analogizing: part of the problem is that areas of discrimination or casual bigotry can overlap, the person who thinks god wants them to discriminate meeting the one whose parents didn't want to fight with their parents about racist remarks in front of the children and the one who isn't bothered by hearing sexist jokes and therefore blames women who are, instead of thinking that maybe their viewpoint is as valid as his…and they form a nucleus of people who think it's oh so edgy to defend their right to be rude.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

It's pretty frustrating to us Boomers too. :-(

We might reply: "We fixed it for our decade, when protest wasn't even cool. Now it's your turn."

Or: "If our way wasn't good enough, why expect us to do better now?"

Or: "How about some perspective. What parts got fixed and what parts did not (or reverted), and why?"

[redbird]

Most of the time, it isn't demanding that the boomers do it better now, it's "don't claim to have fixed everything when you're presented with evidence that the problem still exists." (If someone thinks polio has been completely wiped out, they're mistaken; if they argued that WHO shouldn't work on polio eradication because there is no more polio, and continued doing so when presented with current incidence data, they could be dangerously ignorant.

If you're tired, I understand and sympathize; but it's possible to be tired, and say things like "we thought we would have fixed this by now, and it sucks that this behavior still continues" rather than "don't make me listen to reports of racism and sexism anymore."

For what it's worth, I'm on the edge of the baby boom (I was born shortly before President Kennedy was killed)

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

I was in college in 1963. We did the initial heavy lifting, from a situation that was indescribably worse.

Some of us aren't very excited about reports that seem to have just OMG discovered the remnant of some injustice, and are describing it like it was new news, or something.

"[T]hat this behavior still continues" -- how much of it compared to the 1950s -- where, under what circumstances, how openly, with what new excuse? Now that we established the principles, what's needed to apply our principles to each of these remnants?

[redbird]

Define "initial heavy lifting," with reference to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, A. Philip Randolph, and the suffragist movement. If you were in college in 1963, you weren't one of the lawyers who worked on Brown v. Board of Education.

Seriously: if you want credit from current activists for what you did, you need to also give credit to those who came before you. Which of your relevant principles are "yours"?

That's aside from the fact that the Baby Boomers aren't a homogeneous group, and weren't at the time; consider the average age of the Ohio National Guard.

As for "how openly, and with what new excuse," very often it's not even a new excuse: it's another round of claims that white men are inherently superior, and that women should take harassment as compliments and have no right to complain if they are drugged and raped because they should have known better than to accept an invitation to a party, which they would have been chastised as unreasonable to decline.

There's an article in this week's Science about a polio outbreak in China. Is it inappropriate for that to be on the news pages, because polio is not a new disease? Or is the fact that it not only continues when we'd hoped to have it wiped out by now, but is spreading, in fact news, and important news?

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Sorry if I sounded short, but at least I answered, giving some clues as to why such reports don't get more response from us.

Not about credit but perspective.

sciencemag.org/content/333/6047/1204.2.full is a paywall.

Here's a quote from Science Mag and a summary:
http://stconsultant.blogspot.com/2011/09/polio-is-with-us-yet.html

It is a good example of giving perspective (unfortunately a screen cap not copy/pastable). "After a decade without a case .... four children in [ location ] .... GPEI had hoped to end ... by the end of next year .... confirmed from Pakistan where cases have soared to 72 from 39 .... China will attempt to vaccinate 4.5 million in early Sept this year."

A blogger adds more perspective:
"This outbreak apparently traces back to the failure in northern Nigeria to vaccinate all its kids, and the transmission from infected Nigerians to several other countries during the Hajj."

Back to the OP, most of us Boomers are already busy doing what's appropriate at our age, eg monitoring the business we run or our own farm. Or doing some serious research. Or running our own OMG newsletters. Or just surviving to vote another day (and vet the candidates first).

"Hey, wow, there's this terrible thing called ___ism and it happened somewhere yesterday" is NOT new news.

[redbird]

It's not new news, but if someone comes to me and says "My boss sexually harassed me" or "my nephew was arrested for walking while black," the appropriate response is not "Yeah, we know, that stuff happens." If you don't have the energy or desire to get involved, okay, but don't discourage those who do. "I thought we fixed that" can be actively unhelpful, especially when it overlaps into "there is no racism/sexism/discrimination, therefore you/your friend must be imagining things."

W.r.t. polio, that "failure" to vaccinate everyone in Northern Nigeria, in turn, traces back to an odd mix of religious fanaticism (subset Muslim in this case) and suspicion of foreigners.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Of course a Boomer or anyone should be sympathetic to an individual (and maybe go on to suggest where they coudl get help)!

But the OP was talking about "Baby Boomers who respond to a discussion of an ongoing social problem." So I commented on why more generalized sort of discussions or 'reports' about ___isms may not be read much by some Boomers.

Briefly, to interest the Boomers you're talking about, imo such generalized discussions might use at least an indication of whether you're talking about remnants or revivals (possibly backlashes). And how big the problem is now compared to when we fought it.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

An example of a "new excuse" would be the 2001 terrorist attack on the WTC providing a new excuse for religious bigotry.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

What dismays me is that we didn't fix it, for most values of "it," and once upon a time we actually believed that we could and would.