History - looking back

When I graduated from college I was aware that there was just beginning to be a "Civil Rights" movement. In our college town a black man had dared enter a barber shop where only whites had their hair cut. It was quite stir in Indiana, birth-ground of the KKK. As my friend Ellen pointed out, in our adult lifetime we have seen the country go from not allowing many black people to vote, certainly in the South, to having elected a black man President It seems slow progress but as civilization goes, it wasn't so long after all.

We are now, in the so-called "developed" world, accustomed to rapid change, at least technologically -- since the last presidential election [only 4 years] we've gone from clunky auto cellular phones to everyone having a personal cell phone. Personally, I've joined the email world and use the internet daily which I did not then.

But people's minds and prejudices and political ideas do not change at the rate of LP to cassette to tape to Ipod -- although our mental synapses are still far, far faster and more powerful than any computer chip, we change our ways of acting, being, seeing the world VERY slowly ... but are being pushed ever harder to change ever faster. So in a single life time we here in the US have begun to erase our color prejudices. It is a good, good thing.