I do see what you mean and can't help agreeing with you, but admittedly on romantic rather than practical grounds.I'd like to have been born in 1923. To be of age to enlist in the Marine Corps with the outbreak of WWII. I know that sounds silly, as war is never something anyone should want to experience, but this is all quite theoretical.
I do see what you mean and can't help agreeing with you, but admittedly on romantic rather than practical grounds.
Last Sunday, whilst listening to Sunday Edition, a CBC Radio news program, I heard the word "presentism," which is a new coinage for a not so new concept: assessing (and judging) the past in light of the standards and values of the present.
Among the more obvious examples is flippantly dismissing all that Thomas Jefferson said and did because he held slaves...
Wouldn't we say, "hey, at the time, these were our conventions, our standards, our values and most moral people did their best within the context and construct of what we believed was right?"
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Indeed. It took real courage to racially integrate a public school in 1956. Or to be openly gay even more recently.
At minimum, most such persons were risking their livelihoods, if not their very lives. Few of us can claim such a backbone. That, I suspect, is every bit as true now as it was then.
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Indeed. It took real courage to racially integrate a public school in 1956.