I will start with stating my identity: I am a white man, born smack-dab in the middle of the baby boom demographic. So if my understanding of other identities is less than perfect, please forgive me. I do the best I can. When I was born, in the 1950s, it really seems, now, like a utopia. We had won the Second World War, Eisenhower was president, we were still almost a decade away from JFK’s assassination, and more than a decade away from RFK and Martin Luther King’s killings and the black riots and the student unrest caused by the draft and the Vietnam conflict. It was not officially a war, in fact, we haven’t had a declared war since WWII. It seems, now, like a calm before the storm. I was a toddler in the ’50s, in elementary school when Kennedy was shot. But I had such a sense of well-being. It was as though I absorbed the atmosphere around me and I felt so safe and comfortable. Of course, the Cold War was in full swing, but I knew that the United States was governed by extremely competent people, and I never really felt threatened by Russia. But then came the sixties, and everything that I had understood went through a change. I have evolved as a person, coming to understand that there were a lot of other identities in the world besides mine. The racial injustices are still there, stubbornly. The shootings of black men by police officers has grabbed headlines. But only very recently has sexism come back into the stream of public consciousness.

When I was in my teens and early twenties, there was a feminist movement in America. One of my cousins, an aunt, and my mother were all participants in varying degrees. They all went to Washington once on a march to support the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment, which has so far failed to garner enough states’ support to pass.

What Happened to the Equal Rights Amendment?

But we moved on. Women began attending college in large numbers, now outnumbering men. Women are no less intelligent than men are, and in some ways they surpass men in fields that require compassion and empathy. Women had made such progress that starting around, I would say, the middle 1980s, feminism started to become uncool. Advocating for equal rights for women became unfashionable, something your mother did. It was seen as no longer necessary, unsexy, kind of like a dour-faced symbol of political antiquity. But all the while, sexism has been so enmeshed in our collective psyche that it became largely invisible. That has changed. Now we have women newly empowered, shaming and, in some cases destroying the careers of, notorious abusers of women. However, it is still really difficult to root out sexism, especially when so many women are comfortable with it.

Black women face an additional challenge, that of having to decide whether to support their gender or their race, when a black man is accused of sexual assault. And any discrimination white women face is doubled by that experienced by black women. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in that situation, so I will just leave it at that.

A lot of what complicates relations between the sexes is simple biology. The woman bears the child. That is a big part of the reason women don’t rise as high as men in their careers, since many women put their careers on hold to give birth and raise their children to the point where they feel they can go back to full-time work. But there is no excuse or explanation for the long-term serial sex abusers such as Harvey Weinstein, who has the distinction of kicking off the #metoo movement on Twitter. Men are generally physically stronger than women, and that fact combined with some truly deviant and devious scheming, has allowed powerful men such as Weinstein to carry out their activities.

I have a theory. My theory is that, in spite of all the progress we have made in our society, we are really not very far removed from our origins as cave-dwelling Neanderthals. Back then, the man. with his upper-body strength and masculine id, fought off enemies, hunted for food, and took a wife. The wife cooked and gave birth to and raised children. Notice that I said he “took a wife”. She had no say in the matter. Are we all really so far advanced from that? It is almost as if there is something in our DNA that prevents us, both men and women, from acknowledging women as true equals. Almost.

Here I am again, writing my biweekly blog. I thought I would try something different this time. Instead of preaching and telling, I am asking. For those of you who love our current president, approve of his policies and those of the Republican party, and those of you who detest former President Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton, I have some questions:

1. The Republican party stands for and with the wealthy. Not you. The tax cut that was recently passed, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, primarily benefits wealthy Americans and large corporations. Why do you support it?
2. President Trump campaigned on a promise to drain the swamp. He has filled his cabinet with Wall Street executives and billionaires. What “swamp” is he draining?
3. President Trump recently hired noted war hawk neoconservative John Bolton to the post of National Security Advisor. He campaigned on a promise to stop “stupid wars”. Then why is he hiring a man who is known as the most extreme war hawk in public life today?
4. President Trump and the Republicans in Congress are trying to weaken Obamacare without replacing it with something better. Why is that a good thing?
5. President Trump and the Republicans in Congress want to privatize or defund Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Leaving aside the question of why we don’t have a Medicare for all, why do they want to take away what we already have? Do you want to have your elderly relative thrown out of a nursing home because Medicaid doesn’t have enough money to pay the bill?

Now I realize that many right wingers are what I call tunnel-vision voters. You want to stop abortion, and you want to preserve your 2nd amendment rights. Whatever kind of swill you have to swallow you will swallow as long as those two issues are taken care of your way. Let me try a little advocacy.

You say that you support the Constitution and you are for law and order. And you want the government out of your life. Well, the right to abort a fetus is the law of the land, whether you like it or not. If you don’t like it, don’t do it. It’s a free country and a woman’s body is her own business, not the government’s. A fetus is a collection of cells, not a baby. If your religion is against abortion, fine. Just don’t tell me that I have to abide by the rules of your religion. That is what the Taliban are doing in Afghanistan.

As far as the 2nd amendment goes, I disagree with the Heller decision that former Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, called “a fraud on the American public”. But that is what the law says now, that individual non-military, non-police citizens have a right to own a firearm. So I accept that. We also have a right to own, and drive, a car. That doesn’t mean that anybody 18 years or older can walk into a dealership, write a check, and drive off with an automobile. Cars and their operators are regulated. Cars have to be insured and registered with the government. Drivers have to be trained. Why the hell should firearms be any different? They are dangerous in the wrong hands, just like automobiles are.

If you can answer my questions to my satisfaction, I might change my mind about some of my views. I claim to be open-minded, but who knows? Everybody is open-minded, nobody is a racist, you know the drill. Nobody wants to admit to being wrong or out of touch. Am I either wrong or out of touch? Maybe so. Either one or both? I hope not.