If all the world were paper...

There's so much change going on in the world. HCR has passed in the US, which means maybe one step closer to no more children dying because their parents couldn't afford the treatment. No more people refused help because they have a jumped up 'previous condition', like the crime of being a woman. The 'best healthcare system in the world' shouldn't involve people being turned away from hospitals because they can't pay for life-saving surgery.

We have more and more states understanding the concept of equality for LGBTQQI people - slowly, and some states are going backwards (Virginia, anybody?), but one day it will have to happen. The battle for civil rights never ends, it merely takes on a different face.

But there's a part of me that wonders if a big part of this change is pop culture. The whole point of punk and hardcore bands is to undermine authority and the status quo in the loudest way possible - a great big 'fuck you' to the establishment. And don't get me wrong, sometimes you need someone to shout, but sometimes...sometimes a whisper is more effective. A popular TV show which somehow manages to make things normal which had been hidden before.

My (only living) Grandmother is 88. She grew up in a working class family in the south of Scotland. She's not academically educated (although she's smarter than most people I know). She married a farm worker towards the end of the Second World War.

My Grandmother talks about how racists are abhorrent. About how discrimination is a terrible thing. And as we were watching one of her soap operas - a British soap called 'Emmerdale' (formerly 'Emmerdale Farm') - she was explaining who the people were. "He's quite a busybody. He's taking care of that laddie. The laddie thinks he might be gay, but he's not sure. That woman has just come back into it - she locked the vicar's wife in a church and set it on fire."

Right in the middle of that, as if it was nothing: "The laddie thinks he might be gay, but he's not sure." Not said with any kind of tone, not spat out as if it was disgusting. Just a matter of fact statement. He thinks he might be gay, but he's not sure.

Soap operas have a history of dealing with controversial issues and, often, normalising them. On 'Coronation Street' there is a woman (her name escapes me; I don't watch soaps) who was, at one point, outed as being transgender. There are no disgusting 'sh*m*le' jokes, and any time I've seen it I've never heard the T word. The fact that she is transgender is not something that is made into the butt of the joke. She is simply a woman, who is in a relationship with a man, and who co-owns a café.

Part of the reason people take discriminatory standpoints is fear of the unknown, passed down from their parents and passed on from their friends. But a child seeing this (who hasn't been indoctrinated) may not even twig that there is anything that their parents might not consider to be normal, because it's just...not a big deal. It's just a fact.

And it's things like this, that pass by almost without comment, that leave me with a little bit of hope. The more visible we make things like this, the less of a problem they'll be for the younger generations. Or at least, that's what I'd like to think, anyway. Maybe I'm just being naive.