I was born in the late 1950s. The funny thing about decades is that culturally, they don't begin and end on the oughts. The sixties we think about didn't start until the middle of the decade and didn't end until the middle of the 70s.
This meant that for the first few years of my life, I lived in the 50s. I was a kid, but I still remember the vibe. We were all taught to respect our elders, be polite in public, and stay in our lane. Lanes were important back then. If you were a woman, you had a different role in society, and while you were treated with a certain amount of respect in public, you were "just a woman."
White men ruled, and there were a lot of them. I don't think I saw a Hispanic person in Michigan until much later. Black people were poor and lived in the city. We had a semi-live-in maid whose parents were sharecroppers down South. She and her husband came North to find work in factories. Well, he did. She would not have been allowed to work in a factory then.
These rigid rules of society brought a veneer of order to public life. You knew what to expect. Even in the late 60s and early 70s, when the hippie movement took place, hippies knew they were going to be looked down upon by "the man."
As the hippies got older, they remembered that treatment and decided (some of them anyway) that it wasn't right to treat one group of people differently than others. They set about redesigning the culture so that everyone was "equal" and respect was earned, not given.
On the surface, this sounds like a move in the right direction. However, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If respect is no longer given but earned, many people won't respect others by default. Civil society, as it was called, breaks down. Instead of social rules, we have the good graces of the individual to rely on for how we're treated in public.
To say the results of that experiment are inconsistent would be an understatement. I meet lovely, kind people when I'm out (a lot of them), and I meet people who would mow you down to get to their next destination. I try to be kind to them, too. When you're nasty in public, people will treat you equally badly, and you will form a view of the world that people are nasty. It's a vicious spiral that far too many people are caught in.
The MAGA movement (Make America Great Again, in case you didn't know) wants to roll back the clock. The goal is laudable. Bring back civil society. The approach will never work. The tensions that lay below the surface back then, when people were repressed in the name of social norms, will never be acceptable again.
MAGA as a goal is worthy, but how we get there needs to be reconsidered by those who want to put the genie back in the bottle. We have to move forward from where we are, and people are not going to go back to being unequal, repressed, or dismissed as a fringe of society.
Tactics like taking away abortion rights, removing immigrants, and eliminating programs designed to right the wrongs of our repressive past (like affirmative action) are designed to put the genie back in the bottle.
It's time to bring back civil society without repression. I think it can be done, but we need a new approach. Maybe the MAGA folks will figure that out eventually. I live in hope.
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