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He's about your age.
You kinda left out a little bit about DNA, contraceptives, medicine actually becoming powerful, longer life spans, and the cure for cancer- oops, I guess we don't have that last one, actually. Paternity testing...hard to say whether that one's such a great thing :D
Oh yeah, the Cold War actually ended, too.
We're an age of transition to the Modern condition. Every last bit of investment in the Colonial Age's social and economic arrangements/conventions and way of thinking has to be leveraged against the Modern, every last bit exploited, every last purpose and possibility of that way of life exhausted.
It took ~75 years to get rid of theocracy in this land, and the 1st Amendment is its tombstone. Then another ~75 to get rid of monarchy, which meant a full constitution and a bill of civil rights. Thereupon ~75 to get rid of slavery and the economic aristocracy it enabled- marked by the 13th Amendment. And then ~75 years to attain the vote for all competent adults as the first earnest of formal social equality, and the 15th Amendment is its mark.
Our times are defined by the 14th Amendment (well, Section 1) slowly becoming realized in its spirit as much as its words, and extended to include groups previously discriminated against: Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The wheels grind slowly, but grind they do. And every American age is full of people whose asserted the virtues of the established and the criminality and impossibility of any attempt to improve on them. They achieve great fame and large financial wealth, great acclaim and are awarded great prizes and high offices; they write bestselling books and bad laws and bad verdicts and unfair critiques. History makes them footnotes and fools and forgotten- along with the utopians they harangued against.
History remembers the Susan B. Anthonys, the Abraham Lincolns, the people who won out in the end.
Modernity is at its heart about giving up excuses, about giving up the Big Far Off God of theism and His selfprofessed priests and all the Cosmic Order He Arranged (according to them) for a humbler, more humane arrangement. For humanism of a sort, and the God of the Still Small Voice within each human being. It brings us closer to civilization, but it takes this dreary and horrid and befouled transition stage to get there.
I call it progress, anyway.
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