It’s often said in the context of ‘gay rights’ that change must happen slowly or incrementally, that nonheterosexuals must be ‘patient’ and understand that for hundreds and possibly thousands of years, things have been ‘even worse,’ so that we should be ‘grateful’ for how far we’ve come in a relatively short time. At least we (or some significant percentage of us) are able to live ‘openly’ in society; many of us can tell whoever we want about our sexual preference/orientation/tendencies and expect to survive more than a few seconds, whereas in the not-too-distant past such a disclosure might have led to a beating (or worse) or jail or social ostracization (never mind losing your job). Moreover, evidence for the things-change-slowly argument is often attributed to the natural world, i.e., people will point to the animal and plant kingdoms and say, ‘you see, the world changes very slowly, this is a fact of evolution. Why would you expect society to be any different?’
While I’m not inclined to completely disagree with the idea that things often change slowly, I’m also beginning to reassess the idea that this is always or even often the case. I think about my own life, and when I’ve moved from one place to another (as in, from one city to another), and how the change was utterly sudden and shocking and irrevocable; one day I was in one spot, and the next I was in another. Or think of finishing school, or starting a new job, and how your life is basically the same for a period of time and then very different. Or the way a storm can roll across the horizon in a matter of minutes, creating a deluge before leaving as quickly as it appeared. Or of course there are the dinosaurs, which I think (and I may be wrong about this) it’s widely acknowledge were pretty much annihilated when a meteor struck the earth and made the atmosphere dark and cold, so that only the little warm-blooded rats (from which we all evolved) were able to survive. Basically, one day the dinosaurs ruled the earth, and the next their reign was over.
So the next time someone tells you to ‘be patient,’ I thinks it’s worth asking why they are offering this advice, and whether perhaps they belong to a class of dinosaur already walking under the quickly lengthening shadow of a massive object burning through the sky.
