March 16, 2017

We’re so accustomed to the sentence “All men are created equal” that we don’t recognize how revolutionary it was and still is. I recall once talking to a successful Turkish man and mentioning Islam. His immediate answer was “Oh, no one believes that anymore.” Well a few years later he found out otherwise though whether he ever really accepted it I don’t know. To him and to most of the wealthy classes of this world most of their poorer countrymen aren’t real people – never were and in much of the world outside of the “West” still aren’t. How else to explain wars except that soldiers and farmers are just factors to be used like sheep or raw materials.

Furthermore, leaders of any stripe never seem able to acknowledge victory, but instead continue to expand their domains (or ideas from some soap box) even when the essentials that can be regulated from “on high” have been met.

What has been and will continue to be the driving force for full equality and liberalism generally is not political leaders but movies and TV. It is hard to think of a social movement that wasn’t first made popular by movies. (Molly Goldberg on TV or A Majority Of One, Inherit The Wind, and Twelve Angry Men on stage and in theaters in the 1950s; In The Heat Of The Night and To kill A Mockingbird in the “60s; Driving Miss Daisy and Sesame Street for those younger than me.) It is entertainment more than programs that eventually will change attitudes worldwide and the “leadership” can’t do anything about it..