Our collective period of social change has been the case throughout the Twentieth Century. Change was the case before, too, but slower. The period of change we're in started about the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The speed of change has increased until by now it seems like changes are happening so fast we can't keep up even mentally. Every field of human endeavor is changing at what seems like the fastest pace ever. The younger generations are keeping up, while the older generations let it go by without notice. This has become the nature of our times. I have entered the zone where I care nothing about keeping up with the latest new thing. I've quit listening to new pop music altogether. It seems like what is happening in pop now, from what little I've heard, is a synthesis of what went before. I've not heard much of anything I'd call new. I'm sure there is quite a lot that is new, I'm just out of the loop and don't hear it. Animals As Leaders is a new sound, though I don't see it opening a new direction in rock, unless they set off a wave of interest in jazz rock, which could happen. I'm sure there are people experimenting, attempting to find a way to take rock to a new level. Maybe it has already happened and I don't have access to hearing it.
We humans are changing to the core of our being, possibly from the core of our being. Depends on how you look at it. It's hard to say what we are searching for collectively. The economy looks like it is caught up in the change now, and religion too. Politics and religion are the slowest to change, possibly because they are based in beliefs that are intangible. Old belief systems are breaking down making way for new belief systems. It's called learning. We are learning collectively through this time of scientific discovery, technological discovery, biological, archaeological, astronomical and thousands or millions of other kinds of discoveries. As in our individual lives, when we pass the twelfth grade, we move on to college (sometimes). We're moving into a zone of a whole set of new questions on a regular basis. We're changing the ways of seeing ourselves and the world almost daily. In the old-time religion way we are taught to believe we are so low we are worms IN the ground. We're so low we're below the surface of the earth. It's about humility, but we can have humility above ground too. Seeing ourselves as lowly worms is one of the aspects of our lives we brought into this changing time that has gone away. Self-esteem has become important to us. It is possible to have a positive self-esteem and have some humility too. Because I see myself a worm above ground, it doesn't mean I'm being arrogant about it. I just don't feel like living my life in the grave with a long face saying I'll get my reward when I die.
In this changing time we are going through together, all of humanity, even the people in jungles who shoot arrows at low-flying planes, evidently it is a part of the learning process for us to have codes of behavior and belief that say the old ways are wrong and the new ways are right. Political correctness is basically a belief system of respect for others. PC is so pervasive in the middle class, it's like in a classroom where everyone learns the same thing at the same time. Television does this too. A trend like this carries people who don't think for themselves through the change in thinking. They are carried through the time of change without actively participating. It appears that the enword has been targeted as the one word that comes from the old ways, from the time before electricity and oil, the word that stands for all that needs changing from what went before. It tells me the time we're moving into has no place for disrespect, for racism, one of many forms of disrespect. I get the impression that racism must be settled before we can move ahead. It leads me to believe the time that we're going into will have an emphasis on peace, inner peace and peace between self and others. The prophecy says a thousand years of peace. Maybe this is how we go into it, a baby step at a time toward collective self-awareness, the first step. We're abandoning our counter-productive beliefs about self in relation to others.
To make the leap in consciousness we're making collectively, it stands to reason that many of the changes would be conformity issues, the way we learn our social behavior. I'm recalling a time I was visiting friends down the road. A phone call came from school. The boy in first grade told a little black girl she was "just a nigger." All hell broke loose. The kid gets off the bus and walks to the house knowing there's hell to pay. Daddy told him to go to his room, he'd settle with him later. It seemed kind of odd to me for daddy to punish the kid, considering that's the only word for the black race the kid had ever known. He also knew what he was saying. All through his childhood he liked to provoke the rules. He's grown with kids now and still likes to provoke the rules, but in subtler ways that don't get him arrested. If it had been me in the first grade in 1948, everybody around would have laughed. The word had not any of the power it has now. It was like saying an Italian was a dago, an Irishman a mick, a Frenchman a frog, a Mexican a wetback. Then it was slang. I hate to think of what would happen to a kid today for saying the enword. In little more than half a century, all these "slur" words are forbidden. This is how conformity works. Like they say in gangster movies, We can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. We make it through the change both the easy way and the hard way. The ones slow to catch on are carried along just by living in a society that believes a certain way.
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