Beliefs about what’s normal and acceptable can change
By Jerry Large
The Seattle Times
However things are today, they don’t have to be that way always.
I recently wrote about a project to distribute sleeping bags to homeless people, and in that column I mentioned an effort to end homelessness in the Seattle area. I wasn’t surprised that the 10-year plan was nearing a decade without having eliminated homelessness. To me, reducing it seemed good enough.
But it isn’t really. And because that ongoing struggle has been on my mind, I’ve been noticing how often circumstances, ideas and practices that seem eternal, do change. Sometimes I need to be reminded of that because, like most people, I get used to things as they are. Human lifetimes encompass more change than used to be the case, but we are still most often focused on a narrow range of time.
Looking up occasionally to see what’s possible is good fuel for engagement on matters that need some pushing to move forward.
Recently I read that the Church of England voted to allow women to become bishops. “Today we can begin to embrace a new way of being the church,” the archbishop of Canterbury was quoted as saying.
The directives of a religion are hard to change, but even there public opinion matters, and public opinion is driven by people who ask questions, spread information or advocate change that respects everyone’s humanity.
Still changing
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints allowed men to have multiple wives early in its history and maintained a ban on black men in the priesthood until 1978. It changed, and it is changing still.
The church, known for its secrecy, has been posting essays on its website this year explaining in detail some of its controversial history. The openness is a response to a world in which anyone can find information easily.
More openness is often a component of change. Maybe someday there will even be women in the Mormon priesthood. It seems impossible now, but earlier generations of Anglicans would never have imagined women as bishops.
I like to think that civilization is moving slowly toward more equality, even though it doesn’t always seem like it, and perhaps especially right now in the midst of rampant economic inequality.
Americans will have to let go of some of our powerful secular beliefs if we are going to reduce inequality.
You know that the overwhelming majority of Americans has been losing economic ground for years, while a small portion at the top grows increasingly wealthy. Wealth and income inequality is bad around the world, but U.S. tax-and-spending policies make income inequality worse here than in most developed countries.
Our taxes are lower, and we spend comparatively less on programs that help people who aren’t rich, which is most of us.
The U.S. is different because many Americans believe that taxes are evil and that most government spending is wasteful. American politicians talk about the wealthy as if they were angels and the poor as if they were demons. Those beliefs are rooted in our long history of devaluing labor (slavery, union busting, cutting wages as productivity rises) and distrusting government completely, and of separating ourselves into worthy and unworthy.
Those ideas are old, but they need not be eternal. We can change and adapt to contemporary realities.
Wage theft
The movement for a $15 minimum wage is part of that change, and so is growing attention to the problem of wage theft (illegally withholding pay or denying benefits owed to a worker), which costs American workers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Those movements address specific problems, but they also drive conversations and contribute to reshaping ideas about both what is possible and what is just.
I read a news report on contemporary slavery the other day in which people who enslave other people were referred to as criminals. Even in the land of the free, slavery once thrived (we have images of slave owners on our money). But “owning” someone isn’t a right anymore. It’s something a criminal does outside the law, and someday it won’t be tolerated anywhere because there are people making the crimes public and pushing governments to act.
Beliefs about what’s normal and what’s acceptable can change. What seems a given today can become intolerable tomorrow.
Jerry Large is a columnist for The Seattle Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.