The Human Campaign. (Part one)

When my parents took us to Queensland to live, I thought it was all beaches and deserts. Imagine my surprise to find myself in Ipswich, a town that looked very ‘Old West’ with cast ironwork balconies on the many pubs and swinging doors on the front. This was 1968, months before we walked on the moon, I was moving to a town that looked like John Wayne was due for the hangin’.

My mother made instant friends with the neighbours and I overheard one memorable chat. The subject of the local aborigines came up and he was telling us a few stories of life out west. He finished with words I shall never forget "Yeah, when they got a bit thick we’d give ‘em some flour with some arsenic in it." I have no idea what happened next, I am sure she didn’t rush to the Police Station and report a murder confession. Turning the bloke in was not something that troubled my fourteen year old conscience either, but it does now.

Why is that? I am ashamed that my morality was so deficient as to be near sociopathic, how could I hear and brush off information about mass murder of entire families! But as Sam Harris points out, we are shocked at the morality of our grandparents, just as we will shock our grand children. And this is a good thing. We are getting better as discerning what is right and getting quicker at implementing change. For anyone born before 1950, racism would be common, a hundred years earlier it would be systemic and a couple of hundred years before that ingrained into law and hardly questioned .It took hundreds of years for racists to be regarded as evil by ordinary folk.

That fourteen year old kid attended a school of 1500 students, not a single outed gay. We had suspicions about one kid, but nothing was ever done to him that I heard of. I met him again five years after we left school, he was dressed in cutout black leather and studs.

It took us five hundred years to be rid of enough racism as to enable a black man to be POTUS. It has taken us only thirty years to abandon enough homophobia as to permit same sex weddings. If only I knew what my grandkids will be offended by, so that we could get a head start on the new wave of morality.