Some Good Things Sneak up on You

If you are a certain age, say, over 55, you are probably tired of some of the questions you get about what surprises you.  How often have you been asked if you thought you would ever see a black president in your lifetime? Or, every time a new smart phone comes out, are you still asked if you ever imagined anything like it?  I bet, too, that you never thought you would see the day that gay people would marry, or that gay couples would be featured in movie and TV programs.

Yes, indeed, the world has changed a lot in fifty years.

There have been other changes, as well; more subtle and less dramatic until you look back on them.  Remember when Doctor Ruth caused a radio revolution when she used the actual words of genitalia on her show, and then went one better when she described in graphic terms how to use them?  In those days we also were shocked at the use of four letter words in media.  Now, it’s not realistic, we think, if we don’t hear or read course language. When you see an old advertisement for cigarettes or automobiles, your hair stands up at how gullible we were. There were doctors telling us which cigarettes were healthy for us!  Cars shaped like stone monoliths were, they told us, designed to cut through the air.

Oh, yes, and household items were marketed to the “good wife homemaker.”  If was your job, they also told you, t make your man happy.

It’s all changed but mostly for the better.  Some things have changed so subtly, yet profoundly, that we take for granted that which was unheard of.  My favorite is female doctors.  Yes, it is true that we have watched women finally getting their due in business, politics and science.  These advances have been lauded, and rightfully so, in the media, as well as in the national conversation.  But women doctors, it just kind of happened.

I remember when I was in grammar school we used to get these propaganda comic books called Treasure Chest.  What a disgrace.  According to these cartoon screeds the Communists were coming to take us from our parents, send our fathers off to war, and put us kids in factories.  In some ways we deserved to be lied to like that.  We actually thought our government never lied to us, and that we… America… always wore the white hats.  I hate saying this, but it is true. Those wonderful people we refer to as the greatest generation were certainly that; but they were also the most naïve.  They drank the Cool Aide of their day, and put some in our bottles.

Anyway, somewhere in my propagandized youth, I read where Russia actually had women doctors.  My God, I thought, those commies will stop at nothing!  When I was a kid, or a teenager for that matter, the thought of a women doctor was almost unheard of.  Sure there was the odd pediatrician, babies and all, you know.  But there were no surgeons, heart specialists or even general practitioners. 

  Now, look around you.  It has all changed,  and there is still more progress to be made, but wow.  My sleep doctor is a woman; so too is the surgeon who put my knee back together last year.  And a few years ago, when I suffered a groin injury…we will leave it at that… it was a female who “manned” the sonogram across my privates and later fixed me up.

What was once unthinkable is now standard.  That is indeed one of the enduring gifts of a free society.  We are even free to grow up.  Maybe one day it won’t seem odd to have married and/or women priests.  I am sure we will have a gay commander and chief some time after the female Clinton takes office in 2017. But now I am getting ahead of myself.

Does anyone know a women dentist?