Unending

This, I believe, should be funny. At least, that's the spirit that I believe motivated the post. I, however, simply find it to be sad. Or, to be more accurate, it makes me tired. I'm not sure that I can place a finger on why. This is, after all, simply one guy in an airport, interacting with someone I'd never heard of before reading this.

On second thought, maybe I do understand why. For all that this is a single interaction, it takes on the role of proof that some things never change. It becomes a link in what seems like a single chain of societal sexism, starting in the distant past and reaching beyond the foreseeable future. It takes all of the progress that people tell me that we've made and casually sweeps it aside, in favor of the bleak assessment that nothing ever actually changes.

Which is a dangerous thought, I believe. When something becomes permanent in the mind, does it acquire a sense of invulnerability? One that says that efforts at change are foolish, because they are futile?

For all that I appreciate "zero tolerance" sensibilities, I wonder if they also give rise to the idea that there is no such thing as progress towards a goal. That one is either past the finish line or still in the starting blocks. I don't know.

There will always be clueless guys out there. Detaching that cluelessness from history is difficult. In part, perhaps, because it feels like it allows a place in which the evils of the past can hide themselves to avoid destruction. But there is a chance that part of the way that we rid ourselves of the evils of the past is to refuse to grant them access to the present. And sometimes, this is done by not seeing them unless they go out of their way to make themselves known.