Persistence

On the standard menu system, there is an icon used for saving files. It is a picture of a micro-floppy disk, which according to Wikipedia became popular in the late 1980's. I know that I haven't seen one in decades, let alone a disk drive that would read it.

When I was in graduate school the building I taught in was across from the University Health Services building. Its name and its abbreviation UHS were prominent on signs. Everyone I talked to, including first-year undergraduate students in my class, referred to it as DUH, its previous acronym. When asked my students professed ignorance as to where the University Health Services building was.

Pictures and names of things often persist in our thinking and collectively in our culture long after what they referred to has faded away. It takes conscious thought to realize the disconnect.

I am 60 now. In my childhood everyone I knew, young and old, referred to women in terms of what was perceived to be their natural limitations. I was blessed with knowing women as I grew who were not bound by those limitations, and yet, decades later, I have to fight against some unfair mental reflexes.

This is even harder in terms of the racism that was EVERYWHERE when I was growing up, let alone whispered stereotypes and insults about being something other than straight as an arrow sexually, whatever that means.

I know of many people who speak and act as if people were in the nice neat categories that think that judgment is about damning people who don't behave the way we expect. That does not make me enlightened, woke, pure. It is a daily struggle.

The persistence of bigotry of all kinds is a thorn in my side as a straight white male. I can only begin to imagine what it's like to be on the other side of it.