America was founded on change. It was founded on tweaking the system until it was perfect. It threw off Monarchy for Republic; it got rid of the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution. It Amended and still amends that Constitution. We as a society have made mistakes before, and we will make them again. It’s how quickly we fix them that makes us or breaks us. We have enslaved African-Americans, forcefully migrated Amerindians, demeaned women, and now we marginalize youth.
We passed the Jim Crow laws and segregated black people, and this was a horrible, horrible thing. But at the time very few saw the need for change. False studies in anthroposociology, eugenics and theories of racial “superiority” and “inferiority”, were widely accepted. But after many years of struggle and civil war and blood shed, this finally changed. Racism was finally seen not as a radical cause, but as a fact that needed to be dealt with.
We didn’t give women the right to vote until the 1900’s. We treated them as inferiors even after that. We backed up our arguments with junk studies in sociobiology and ridged Androgyny. We have media articles about the perfect family, the wife’s nuclear role. We saw them as less then us.
Now, we don’t give youth the right to vote, or really the right to anything, we treat youths as inferiors. We back up our ingrained beliefs with Junk studies and media articles. We dismiss ageism as a far-fetch claim of rebellious youth. But just as with Racism and Sexism, we must look beyond imposed stereotypes. We must look to what is real, what is around us.
There will be those who don’t recognize ageism, just as there were those who didn’t recognize racism and sexism. History shows us it will be a long struggle, but history shows us we will prevail. Don’t despair or disbelieve. I’ve backed up my arguments well. We are fighting against a state of mind. But isn’t it time to create a more perfect union? Isn’t it?
