The Subtle Revolution

Sometimes the most important changes in a society are the ones that almost never make the news.

{ Wil Darcangelo }

Sometimes the most important changes in a society are the ones that almost never make the news.

          Spend enough time watching the news, and it becomes easy to believe that America is trapped. Every day brings another cultural battle, another angry protest, another viral confrontation, another prediction that we are becoming more divided than ever before.

          The news is not lying. It is simply doing what news has always done. It reports what is unusual.

          Conflict is unusual, surprising though that may seem.

          What the news almost never reports are the millions of ordinary moments in which people quietly change their minds.

          That may be one of the greatest blind spots in modern life. We are remarkably good at noticing exceptions and remarkably poor at noticing trends.

Yet trends are what shape history.

Consider something that would have seemed almost impossible only a generation ago.

          In 1998, Tammy Baldwin became the first openly LGBTQ+ person ever elected to Congress. For years, she was almost alone. If you had looked only at that moment, you might reasonably have concluded that America simply was not ready.

Today, 13 openly LGBTQ+ Americans serve in Congress.

That statistic is often presented as a victory for LGBTQ+ visibility. It certainly is. But I think it tells us something even more interesting. It tells us that millions of Americans have changed.

         Every openly LGBTQ+ member of Congress was elected primarily by people who are not LGBTQ+. Congressional districts are overwhelmingly heterosexual. Every election required hundreds of thousands of voters to decide that a candidate’s sexual orientation or gender identity was simply not the most important thing about them.

          Consider what that means. Every one of those elections represents thousands upon thousands of conversations that never appeared on television. Parents who reconsidered old assumptions.

         Friends who got to know someone they had once misunderstood. Co-workers who discovered that familiarity dissolved fear. Congregations that chose relationship over stereotype. Families that discovered love was stronger than expectation.

        Those stories rarely become headlines. But together they become history.

          The same pattern appears far beyond LGBTQ+ representation. The United States has steadily elected increasing numbers of women, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Muslims, Hindus and members of other communities that were once almost entirely absent from national leadership.

            None of these changes happened overnight. None happened without resistance. Every one of them encountered people who sincerely believed the country was changing for the worse.

          And yet, over the long arc of decades, Americans continued expanding the circle of people they were willing to trust with leadership.

         That doesn’t mean prejudice disappeared. It hasn’t. It doesn’t mean every election moves in the same direction. They don’t. History is rarely a straight line. But history does have direction.

         One of the reasons to find hope in this is that it reveals something deeper than changing politics. It reveals changing psychology.

          Human beings are capable of learning. We often imagine social progress as something driven by activists, legislators, court decisions or presidents. Those certainly matter. But beneath those visible events lies something quieter.

          Ordinary people revise their understanding of one another. That process is almost invisible while it is happening. Someone meets a gay coworker. A grandparent discovers their beloved grandchild is transgender. A church welcomes a family they once might have viewed with suspicion. A neighborhood elects a mayor who would have been considered unelectable twenty years earlier.

None of those moments feels like history. But together they are historic. Perhaps that is why hope can be so difficult to recognize. Hope is usually quiet. Fear announces itself. Acceptance simply gets on with life.

         There is another lesson hidden in these trends. The loudest voices in our culture often attempt to convince us that humanity is becoming less capable of living together. They argue that diversity inevitably produces division, that inclusion weakens communities, or that old boundaries must be restored if society is to flourish.

          Whatever influence those arguments have had, they have not stopped the broader trajectory. Election after election, Americans continue choosing candidates whose identities would once have disqualified them before they ever opened their mouths.

         That does not mean voters agree with every position those candidates hold. It means something more fundamental. Increasingly, Americans are deciding that identity alone is an insufficient reason to reject someone’s leadership.

         That is a remarkable civic achievement. It suggests that beneath all our noise and polarization, our moral imagination continues to expand. We are becoming, however imperfectly, more capable of separating a person’s identity from their humanity.

         We are learning to ask better questions. Not ‘What category do you belong to?’ but ‘Can I trust you? Are you wise? Are you honest? Will you serve the community well?’ Those are healthier questions. Those are the questions democracies need. Those questions are the harbingers of great progress to come.

         So how do we become a wind at the back of this quiet revolution?  Probably not by shouting louder than everyone else. Probably not by humiliating people who still have more to learn.

          History suggests that human beings change most often through relationships rather than argument. We become less fearful when we know real people instead of abstract categories.

          We become more generous when curiosity replaces certainty. We become more hopeful when we remember that almost everyone is capable of growth—including ourselves.

Perhaps the most important thing any of us can do is surprisingly ordinary. Introduce people. Tell stories. Extend invitations. Create communities where strangers become neighbors. Model the kind of curiosity we hope others will practice. Celebrate integrity wherever we find it. Refuse to reduce anyone to a label—not even those with whom we disagree.

           That last point may be the hardest. If we believe people can change, we have to leave room for them to do so.

            The encouraging news is that millions of Americans already have. You can see it not only in opinion polls or election results, but in schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, families and houses of worship. The headlines still capture conflict because conflict is dramatic.

            History, however, is written by more persistent forces. It is written by ordinary people who slowly decide that another human being deserves to be seen not first as a category, but as a person.

          The remarkable increase in openly LGBTQ+ public officials is one small window into that larger story. It reminds us that progress is rarely as loud as backlash.

It also reminds us of something profoundly hopeful. Human beings are actually learning. Not all at once. Not without setbacks. But steadily enough that, if we lift our eyes above today’s arguments and look across the decades, we can see the shape of the journey. And it is carrying us, however slowly, toward one another.