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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.)
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.)
