When I was young(er)…

When I was a child, someone told me that the reason men make more money than women is because they have to support a family. Women just work for “extra money.” Seemed logical. I accepted it.

When I was in my teens, at a family reunion, I asked my cousin’s husband, an airline pilot, why more women weren’t in the cockpit. He told me, “Isn’t it better not to compromise safety? Would you want to fly in a plane where the pilots were not the best out there, but were chosen through affirmative action?” Seemed like a good point.

When I was in my 20s, I joined the military. I was a lesbian, but Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was in place. I tried to discreetly (without revealing too much) argue that it was a bad policy. People told me that morale would suffer if gays were allowed to serve openly. It’s more important that we don’t sacrifice morale than that we have a social experiment. It will take decades for that to change, if ever. OK.

In the mid-2000s, there was a push for same-sex marriage. It’s not time yet, I was told. People are barely getting used to having openly gay people around. They can’t be expected to accept MARRIED gays…not yet. Not for a long while. Mmhmm.

People are shaped by social norms and expectations. That they just think inside the box. That that’s “just the way it is” – why are you rocking the boat? Are you being obnoxious just to be obnoxious? That’s not ladylike.

To get ahead in this world, you, as a woman, I was told, have to understand that you can’t be too “dingy” (with a hard “g”) or you won’t be taken seriously. But you can’t be too manly or you’ll be thought of as a dyke. And you haven’t earned the right to be manly. Never will. You’re still just a woman.

But I digress.

My point is…

I have thoughts that are shaped by my childhood. Not my parents’ explicit teachings. Not anything the school did intentionally wrong. But the oozings of societal expectations and mores. The things that we as a society have built over time to provide structure. To provide stratification, so we all know where we stand. Don’t step out of your lane. We have put you in that box over there. Sit.

This lack of thinking outside the box – the lack of questioning of our very existence – that has led us to the herd mentality that exists. We must learn to think logically, using science.

It is ironic, is it not, that those who most loudly say they won’t give up their “freedoms” are the very people who have succumbed to the mindless, pigheaded, ignorance that “the government” (at least the GOP-controlled one) wants them to have?

If they would open their eyes…if we would stop the sources of trance-inducing “journalism” from the right wing…perhaps we would begin to see more sanity in today’s “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”