Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
I've been trying to think about what might be the skeletons in the closets of our contemporaries, as viewed by people 50-100 years from now.
Perhaps some will be judged harshly for holding the view that boys are boys and girls and girls. And seen as backward for not letting their kids choose their own gender identity and treating them as gender-neutral at birth.
"Can you believe Justin Trudeau raised Ella-Grace as a girl from birth simply based on what she/he looked like biologically? He had her/him wear dresses and other pink clothes. He also had her/him wear her hair long, occasionally in braids and often done up with barrettes. She/he had no choice in the matter. Talk about gender brainwashing. Eeeeeeeeeewwww. No statue on Parliament Hill for him!"
I also think our era and those that came before may be judged harshly for our treatment of animals. Notably for eating them and also for not being generous enough in the "rights" that are afforded to them.
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We really can only speculate on what future social mores might be. I have a feeling that the 2010s are sort of like the 1970s - a period where social boundaries that were tested in the previous decade get pushed a bit "too far" for the likes of many people - and I expect an even bigger social conservative backlash in the future, sort of like how the 1980s had a bit of a 1950s veneer to it.
I can kind of already see it brewing among my generation of early Millennials (born early 1980s) who will be at the height of their generational power by the 2020s. It's kind of like how baby boomers, who were the hippies of the 1960s/70s became the yuppies of the 80s and turned the clock back on social "progress". Recently, I went back to Ontario to hang with my old high school buddies. Over drinks, I asked them to give their unvarnished opinions on the social issues of our day.
Most of them invoked "negative rights" and acknowledged that people who are marginalized should be allowed to live the way they want to live. That's a common strain among people of our generation who were raised in non-religious households. However, they also opined that many of the issues that people on the social far left take as being "normal" are borderline transgressive, or, at the very least, misguided. For example, two of my friends believed that transgenderism was probably a form of undiagnosed mental illness. Unlike other mental illnesses, they argued that people who identified as transgendered should probably self-medicate (i.e. undergo gender conversion, if that will make them feel better, without soliciting the advice of a mental health professional), and use whatever bathroom they felt like, but that it was not something that should be celebrated, either.
Now, they're mostly white men, given that I grew up in Peterborough. But white people are more likely to study things like the social sciences at the graduate level (many of my friends did), where they are exposed to other cultural perspectives. I've asked these questions of other good friends of mine who are sons and daughters of visible minority immigrants (like me), many of whom studied STEM subjects and aren't exposed to critical thinking and testing one's bias on a social issue, and the unvarnished opinions they give are often even more socially "conservative" than my white friends. Few of them are "woke", as the saying goes.
That's another thing: as Canada becomes more of a country defined by immigrants, social conservatism will be on the rise. Another unacknowledged issue is that many people who are on the far left socially, but white, think that people of colour will somehow band together as a unifying bloc of progressiveness and support each other's issues because they have their visible minority status in common and are not white. As a "person of colour", I can tell you that that's completely delusional.