Who's winning?

Recently, one of my less political stops in the blogosphere veered into politics. Regrettably, the content took me off the wagon as far as political comments go. But it did make one think.

What I thought about, for a rather tangential reason, was smoking and its place in the world (choke) 50 years ago. In those bygone days, absurdly worshipped by people who didn't live through them, virtually everyone with both feet out of the grave smoked. Many people with one foot in the grave smoked. Actors playing doctors smoked in TV dramas.

Actors playing doctors sold cigarets. Anchormen (no anchorwomen then, sorry) sometimes smoked on the air. It was every child's ambition to smoke. I was not quite 12 then. I had already illicitly tasted tobacco, although it didn't impress me enough to smoke in earnest until I was 17 or so. To be anti-tobacco was either to be morbidly ill or some kind of pinko.

People, like my mother, who didn't smoke because they did not enjoy it, felt compelled to apologise for not smoking. That's the memory which came up when I was reading at that site about how people who have abortions or support them now feel similarly apologetic.

My observation as an historian on the cusp of 62 is that the victories of reaction are temporary and transitory. They are likely to be overturned in unexpected ways. Despite the ebb and flow (which can, unhappily, set things back for more than a lifetime) the general movement is toward more tolerance and less apology. It seems to be hard-wired. Regrettably, the habit of substituting either ideology or superstition for frontal lobe function seems just as hard-wired, and hence very hard to overcome.

I have my own probable scenario for the eventual resolution of what seems like an irresolvable conflict. Past experience here tells me to keep it to myself.