Reply #1: It's the general direction we are heading [View All]

It's kind of cute that the kid thinks his generation is the first to discover a wider worldview.

From my POV any stable, relatively open society will bend toward more openness as the years pass by. That idea is what keeps me optimistic about the future of the US.

I'll give myself as an example. My grandparents generation used the N-word liberally, even though they had AA neighbors and "friends" of a type. Of course, it's ignorant, hypocritical, hateful ... and all the rest. You think we didn't grow up in the 60s and 70s NOT noticing that?

Of course we did. And we vowed to live our lives differently.

We also had mass media. We had the news from the rest of the nation. We had radio and were listening to music that they liked in other places as well as our own. We had the ability, not available to previous generations, to look at ourselves from an outsider's perspective. Of course, it made us wince and feel ashamed. That's the point. Part of growing in wisdom is being able to look at the mirror that others hold up to us. Sometimes the reflection looks good, other times not.

To go back further, my parents were more worldly wise than my grandparents. My parents were the WWII generation. They had traveled beyond their childhood homes. Seen other places, met other people, ate other food. My Dad's brother found himself traipsing after Patton in North Africa and Italy. Imagine a sharecropper's son from red clay NC driving across the desert! Lordy, the stories he used to tell! ;-) My parents stayed in the US during the war, but they lived in other places besides their birthplaces. Mom's family moved from PA to MO. She learned Spanish in School... in the 1930s! Dad spent the war in Biloxi, MS. One of Dad's jobs in the army was to run the movie theatre on base. Before the movie as now, they played music. Well, back then it was records on a turntable. Never the less, Biloxi was where Dad learned about the big bang and swing music that he loved.

My grandparents had slightly different lives than their parents. My paternal grandparents were sharecroppers, true. But they had the experience of living in town and working in the tobacco factory for a time in their youth. Grandma liked it, but Granddad did not. So they *chose* to return to farming. They made an informed choice about their lives.

My point is any given individuals worldview is the the result of what has gone before, by previous generations giving him or her the opportunity to explore and think differently.