chocolatepot | (Reply)

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People do make the world better. We have a black president and a female secretary of state. We have birth control. I'm living with a man out of wedlock and not one person has tried to shame me for it -- not even online! (Maybe I am scary?) My mother even told me to live with a man before marrying him. Hell, look at us all reading and writing here, having opinions our fathers didn't tell us to have, choosing to marry people our fathers didn't choose for us.

Sometimes things go backward temporarily, and during the Bush administration, some things went backward, particularly regarding women. But we have a fair pay act now. It is now the law that we do not pay more for health insurance than men.

My mother and my dad's girlfriend have some horror stories about being a working woman during the 70s and early 80s. As a lawyer, my dad's girlfriend repeatedly ran into male lawyers who expected her to have sex with them as the price of her job. (She didn't, and it hurt her career.) That surely still happens, but it's actually against the law now, as it wasn't until very, very recently.

I'm going to get back surgery. You know all about my pain and disability. I would have likely had that pain and disability for the rest of my life if not for the black president the United States elected. It's possible that the back surgery won't solve everything, but it will most definitely help. And just looking at science -- I would not have survived my first hours without scientific progress, and I wouldn't be able to have this surgery without it, either. Stuff's getting better.

Having lived through the 80s -- trust me, you do not want to be there. People did not in general think things could get better, it was a hellishly depressing time when the rich kept getting richer and the poor kept getting poorer, and no one at all seemed to care. The Soviets were gonna drop a bomb on us any day, so what did it matter? I'm not exaggerating. As a child, I really and truly believed -- as did all of my friends and, as far as I could tell, all the adults -- that none of us would live to see 1990.