Times change. But it hasn’t always been so obvious.
For millennia, no one on Earth saw much change at all in a single lifetime. Not until the start of the 19th century when, thanks to the invention of the train, man for the first time could move faster than the speed of a galloping horse.
Today, times are still changing, but at warp speed.
Look at how long it took even in many of our lifetimes for certain changes to rock the world. As recently as the mid-1990s, same-sex marriage was banned in almost every state in the union; President Clinton signed a law in 1996 forbidding the federal government to recognize it.
Yet even before the U.S. Supreme Court spoke last week, same-sex marriage already was legal in more than two-thirds of the states — and now it’s legal everywhere. As social issues go, that’s warp speed.
Look at how long it took before Confederate flags were acknowledged for what they really are. Yet now, in Alabama, the governor ordered four of them removed from a Confederate memorial at the capitol. This is Alabama, where in 1963 Gov. George Wallace infamously declared at his inauguration, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
In Mississippi, where Freedom Riders were murdered just for campaigning for civil rights and Gov. Ross Barnett declared that “The Good Lord was the original segregationist,” everyone today from the state’s speaker of the House to both United States senators has called for the confederate symbol to be struck from the state flag. In Mississippi, for God’s sake!
And of course there’s South Carolina, whose legislature voted unanimously after the election of Abraham Lincoln to become the first state to secede from the union; historical and cultural pride there runs deep. But now, after the racist murder of nine black citizens in Charleston, elected leaders came together, liberals and conservatives, and the state House voted overwhelmingly to talk about finally removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse.
South Carolina’s senior senator, Lindsey Graham, said, “This is a circumstance where the people led the politicians.” What a concept. (Maybe the politicians should take their lead from the likes of Target and Sears, Amazon and Walmart, which almost instantly removed all Confederate merchandise from their stores.)
Do all the people want that kind of sea change? No; the 103-10 vote in South Carolina’s House proved that. Likewise, do all the people want to sanction same sex marriage? Again, the answer is no — the Supreme Court’s 5-4 opinion proved that. But clearly, public opinion has shifted on both.
This is hardly the first era in which there have been cataclysmic shifts like this. Think about just the second half of the last century — Vietnam, civil rights. But on those issues and others, it took years, even decades of massive demonstrations and violent confrontations, tear gas and sometimes bullets, before the public moved the politicians to, well, move.
What’s changed? It’s impossible to wrap it all up in a single reason, but today’s users of social media have replaced yesterday’s marchers on the Mall. That’s what turned the Arab Spring into a firestorm, albeit ultimately a disappointing one. Issues move at the speed of communication. Today, communication is instantaneous, and it has transformed our nation and our world.
This doesn’t mean that tomorrow, cultural homophobia and institutional racism will disappear from our lives. After all, the killer in Charleston didn’t shoot up the church because the Confederate flag flew in front of the statehouse. But if he even felt some kind of subconscious support because society seemed to sanction such a symbol of hate, maybe now we’re a little closer.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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