The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Cheer up, Progressives

Cheer up, Progressives

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, October 25 2019, 22:13:17 (UTC)
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Conservative, Liberal and Progressive...these terms meant different things at different times. Today a Conservative wants things to go backwards, especially cultural issues....the Conservative longs for a mythical past when things were "better", for Conservatives. They see danger to their privileges and status when things “change”.

The Liberal likes the status quo well enough to be suspicious of change though not downright hysterical over the possibility. The Liberal might well like things to change but not enough to do anything risky about it...for the most part Liberals are useless people; they neither want to go backwards or forwards.

Progressives actively work towards progress, as the root of their name states. The fact that we're still not eating humans raw or burning women as witches or using medicine instead of wishful thinking is all due to Progressives. Go back to the time of Galileo....the Conservatives of his day wanted to stop any change in the way people were told to think about the cosmos....Liberals back then would have accepted a change, without doing anything to bring it about...the Progressive was the one who challenged both the Liberal and Conservative views by pointing to a future, down the road. Of course, the Progressive pays a heavy price initially but wins in the end...which is why Conservatives are so grumpy; they know they hold a losing hand.

The thing to remember, and always be cheered by if you're a Progressive, and despair over if you're a Conservative, is that the Progressive position almost always, by a huge margin, wins out in the end...we know that because people rejected the Church's views and adopted new ones which, in time, have gained acceptance everywhere there are sensible people. When the 13th Century ended we didn't go back to the 12th, we moved ahead to the 14th, discarding all sorts of views and beliefs we once fervently held. And as each century progressed (ahem) into the next we got rid of more and more beliefs and even laws which saddled humanity in its infancy...in short; the Progressive view is the adult view, the Conservative is the petulant and fearful child's position...one which wants to go back to the womb or just hide under the bed.

Life moves forward...it certainly doesn't go backwards or even stop. Take any position or cultural point of view you want and track its history and you'll find it born of barbarism and ignorance BUT, moving forward, under great pressure, losing the worst qualities in exchange for progressive ones....there will always be backlash and resistance..humanity will even periodically go backwards, as when Fascism tried to revive monarchy and kings and one-man rule...but they don't last, they can't because the majority have moved on though it takes time to wake them up to the danger.....but, once awake, modern forces crush the backward push and we move on.

Progressive causes and ideas have at their root a common desire to spread freedom, equality and justice to ever larger groups of people while expanding and deepening their meaning. In their essence this was what the Labor and Union movement was, Civil and Women's rights movements were...Gay rights and marriage equality movements were...all of them and thousands more like them sought justice, freedom and equality with expanded definitions....naturally that meant focusing on those who didn't have those things, or enough of those things, yet. Naturally the Conservatives of the age, or any age, were against sharing what was til then their own exclusive domain.

Take what modern Conservatives in America, would now consider to be the wildest, most dangerous, most impractical ideas of the Progressives and you can bet that given time, these will become the dominant accepted views...it's happened throughout history already and will always happen. We just have to endure and be patient with the fearful, selfish, narrow minded fears of the Conservatives plus the contended apathy of the Liberals, and the Progressive point of view will win out.

Progressives just have to not take a view similar to that of religious fundamentalists that Christ will come back in their lifetime. Likewise the Progressive agenda will not be completed in one lifetime, even though a few things have moved really fast in just one...such as Civil and Women's Rights, Gay marriage and legalized marijuana.

In a mere 60 years, one lifetime, the die-hard, centuries-old and even "divinely" mandated opposition to these radical changes has been reversed. Not entirely, as it never is, but gradually until the tipping point. Of course, as to be expected, there are large numbers of Conservatives shocked and dismayed who have been mounting a backlash.....and though they've stalled progress they haven't been able to reverse it and they won't either because for these changes to have taken place at all, and so quickly, means the numbers were there, or change never would have happened in the first place.

Looking back at cultural development and growth Progressives can rest assured their current views will one day prevail, as history shows so clearly....we just have to be patient.

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