Sometimes when I feel the need to write but don’t have an idea, I scan through my journals. Sometimes I find something worth stealing from me.

Or sometimes I don’t, as with this entry: Observational journaling is hard, especially when you don’t go anywhere.

I did find the following, though, dated November 2017:

I watched an old movie: Stormy Weather. It had an all-black cast, full of talented people: Lena Horne, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Bill Robinson, Dooly Wilson, Dizzy Gillespie, Cozy Cole, the Nicholas Brothers, and Coleman Hawkins, plus several I didn’t recognize. It was released in  1943.

Although I enjoyed the movie, the stereotypes bothered me. Dooley Wilson’s character (Gabe) was a close approximation of the Kingfish on Amos and Andy. Bill Robinson was all eyes and teeth, like Armstrong. There were even several minstrels, black actors in blackface.

Then it occurred to me. I was thinking in 2017 about actions in 1943. They didn’t know then how they would be judged now. In 1943, they were talented professionals making a good living—and they (like Armstrong) probably did their social testifying on their own time. They were living by the rules imposed on them by a more powerful and often hostile society and doing very well at it. God bless them for succeeding despite the world around them.

Then, the next day I read a long article about Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden, along with a massive amount of piling on by people who wished that Biden were not the presumptive Democratic candidate for president. Reade accused Biden of several things, including one which, if proved, deserves conviction and punishment, whether it was committed by a Democrat, Republican, Whig, or Tory. The accusations also included some things that were commonplace thirty years ago and have become egregious in the days of the #MeToo movement, such as a statement about Reade’s legs, reported to her by a third party.

Based on what I’ve read to this point, it appears that Reade’s accusations may be self-serving and not really credible. Then there is the pragmatic point. If we consider Reade’s allegations credible, we’ll be faced with choosing between a candidate who has been accused of sexual harassment and another who bragged about it, paid off women, and shows no signs of thinking that he has done anything wrong.

I don’t find any real equivalency in that. I will vote for Biden. He wasn’t my first choice, but he is far better than what we have.

However, our danger in applying a revisionist moral code to the past goes far deeper and wider than Joe Biden and Tara Reade. It sets up a retroactive test that virtually guarantees that the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater.  

I grew up in a time when the boundaries were very different. When I was in high school, boys made comments to girls that under today’s rules would have been reported to Human Resources and probably cost the male part of that interchange his job. The girls didn’t report it. Some of them giggled. Some of them sternly told the male to watch his mouth, and occasionally, you would see a mouthy male with a handprint across his cheek.

Generally, innuendo and gestures that fell short of action were dealt with at the lowest possible level: between the participants.

(Full disclosure: Because of what my mother taught me, I wasn’t involved with innuendo, gestures, nor actions. In fact, two girls that I dated a couple of times quit accepting my dates for the same reason. They said I was boring. That was probably true.)

I am not arguing that we should return to the days of yesteryear, nor do I believe that women should have to put up with anything they are not comfortable with. Nor, for that matter, should men. However, I find it difficult to condemn someone for “improper touching, not of a sexual nature” that occurred three or four decades ago unless the person touched called it out at the time. And then—if it was repeated—that becomes an offense.

I have written before that I seem to be a micro-bigot. I have, for years, done things that are now deemed microaggressions, such as asking someone who speaks another language to teach me a few words. I still don’t see why that should be offensive, but now I’m much slower to do it. I no longer ask people in restaurants what language they are speaking, and if they’ll teach me to say “hello” and “thank you.”

I learned this morning that a Conservative that I enjoy disliking is being taken to task for using the word Negro. I didn’t realize that it is now considered offensive, and evidently, Dennis Praeger didn’t either. I wonder if the United Negro College Fund has gotten the memo. When I was growing up, “negro” was the courteous expression.

Growing old in a changing world is difficult. I’m making every effort to conform to today’s norms in language, attitude, and action, but I still find that I’m sometimes behind the curve. Understanding that I’ve developed a simple set of guidelines that should keep me in most people’s good graces, avoid unintended offenses, and generally from looking like a troglodyte. They are:

·       I will not assume that any person wants greater familiarity from me than he or she indicates. That means that I don’t initiate hugs, which isn’t all that hard since I’m not a big hugger anyway. It also means that I won’t guide conversation into potentially personal places without a clear signal that the other person is okay with that.

·       I will be receptive to learning what the other individual considers offensive, so I don’t do it. I’m one of those privileged people who has not experienced sexual, racial, or other discrimination first hand. That sort of privilege can leave tone-deaf to offense.

·      I will do what my mother taught me to do: treat each person with respect. There’s nothing new about that. It just got labeled PC.

In return, I would like to see people live in the present under the current rules. I would also like to see those who are offended by micro-aggressions have the burden of calling them out, rather than attempting to extract some sort of vengeance because they perceived it. (A dean in a California college lost her job because a student took offense to a single word in an email. A DJ in Chapel Hill was fired on the spot because he played a song that a patron complained could trigger someone. That’s someone else! A reporter tweeted a lame joke on a flight between the US and Africa and had lost her job by the time she landed.)

In an article I read on micro-aggression, the author said: “intent does not matter.” That is not a world I want to live in. Nor do I want to live in a world where we comb over people’s lives looking for a single thing that will negate whatever good they’ve done. Nor do I think I’m smart enough to travel back through time so that I can walk in another’s shoes and judge their actions performed under an entirely different set of rules.

Instead, I applaud Dooly Wilson, Lena Horne, and all the others in Stormy Weather, as well as others who did great things while conforming to societal mores that today are considered repugnant.  They lived in their times. We live in ours.

After a fashion. I think we should be more careful about time travel in terms of our opinions.

(For another view of a similar rant, see here.)