Today is the 70th anniversary of the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, one of the first international conflicts of the Cold War era.

—CNN’s 5 Things

Right there: “Korean War.” It was studiously called a “police action” when I was a girl. No war was declared and we were corrected if we slipped and referred to it as a war.

It was not a “war” perhaps because WW2 was still so fresh and set a high bar for what qualified as a war. It was not a war because Congress had not declared it. Though I was born in the middle of that conflict, the first war—the first called a “war” in my life—was Viet Nam, then most often written as two words. Like all America’s wars but our own Revolution and Civil Wars, it took place far away and cost those distant nations more suffering, death, and loss than Americans could ever appreciate.

We in the United States were flush and rich and strong. What would become known as Midcentury Modern design after Post-Modernism spun its wheels a couple decades ago, was then cheap housing for a booming generation with the barest minimum of millwork, and mass-produced furniture mostly imported from European nations still clawing their way out of the Great Depression and post-war poverty. Life was grand here, though not for everyone. Not so grand if you were poor or female or any race and religion other than WASP. [And that’s not even considering anyone with “minority” mind or gender or sexual orientation, language or heritage, physical or other challenges—which got people beaten, jailed, or otherwise institutionalized—however bad it remains, those were bad years for the vast majority of Americans, despite mythology to the contrary. The “melting pot” was aspirational but a lie. Those in power didn’t want their portions to touch on their plate. And despite what both Testaments and Jesus had to say about poverty, we have cultivated the notion that being poor is personally sinful and embarrassing instead of societal failure, which those with power and wealth are expected to repair.]

[I think my dad would be pleased that I can see my own history as an objective element in history. It is one of the most interesting things about living long.]

Gary and I had lunch yesterday with a former student who just turned thirty and his partner. “Partner.” In my old fashioned way, I wonder when former students tell me they have a partner, does that mean they are gay? I know enough not to ask. It is outdated thinking, and inexcusably judgmental. There are no “girlfriends” or “boyfriends” anymore as those terms are both inaccurate and prejudicial. Maybe even pejorative. I understand this. Women in my childhood were still referred to as “girls” pretty much all their lives. By the time “girls” were my age, calling them girls became a form of flattery. (We were expected to flutter and giggle and turn all warm and easy-to-manipulate when called girls.) I still recall reading an academic Behaviorist study and having to rethink what I knew when I found photos of the “girls” who worked on the project. They looked to be at least as old as my mother, then in her 40s. (And in my teens, once there were the words, I became a “feminist”, a “Ms”. Why should anyone care about my marital standing unless they were flirting—and if it mattered, why remain mute about men’s marital standing? In the 1960s, “gender equity” was not even a term. Yet.) Assumptions about gender and sexual orientation present an egregious bias. “Partners” is objective, accurate without implying more than a private relationship.

Sensitivity in use of language is not a trivial matter. (Gary still smarts about a friend’s use of “white trash” as someone who was the son of a child who was herself a sharecropper’s daughter, abandoned as a child, and grew up fostered poor in Oklahoma. A high school graduate but dismissed by her husband’s family as beneath them?) Each generation struggles to find freedom and justice. What that looks like to the youngest among us continues marching toward egalitarianism. Members of the younger generation are what many people of my generation would call “Lefties.” [I would call them right, not rightwing, but correct in their ambitions.]

Credible surveys find that younger people want not just gender equity but fairness all around, better gun regulation, action on global warming (or “climate change” if even during this record-breaking northern hemisphere summer people insist), and economic fair play. Meanwhile, in some parts of the world, populations have swung right. Here in the United States, we have a mess. MAGAs insist that balance means digging for dirt to equal the mud hole their party has dug itself into. It isn’t there. Hillary’s emails are not remotely equivalent to Donald removing tactical secrets when he left the White House and lying about it. Republicans of my childhood would come across as centrist-leaning Democrats today. It was Eisenhower, after all, who warned of the threat posed by the “military industrial complex.”

Close after the second Great War in the twentieth century, Americans believed we had done with war altogether. They believed that in 1919 and they believed it again in 1945. Wars to end all war. That’s why, when we sent our military to Korea just five years after World War Two, it was a “police action.”

I remember that.

And the fantasy Florida is trying to make of the taught history of slavery in my country? Been there, done that. I recall vividly coming home from Fourth Grade and repeating what I had been taught about slavery, that slaves were better off that workers in the industrial NE. It would have been the winter of 1959, I had just turned nine, and I think it was the first time I saw my father angry.

His undergraduate degree from the UC Berkeley was in History, and his focus was the Civil War, then called “The War Between the States” in my Social Studies book. Even angry, my father did not shout or throw things. He retaught me the history. The words I recall: “Free people in the north had the choice to leave; slaves could not.” He had a degree in Librarianship from USC and told me all the school textbooks came out of Texas and their bias made the books I was given inaccurate and racist. As I learned through my own research, it is true that slaves provided much of the skilled labor in the South; after freedom, it did them little good when they fled north and found themselves shut out of unions. (That’s still mostly true today—where American school texts come from and their rightwing bias.)

Televisions were black and white, gas was cheap, girls had to wear dresses to school, and boys could be drafted and sent to war in a police action and to Vietnam, at eighteen. It would be three years before they could vote for representatives that might choose not to do those things. (You had to be 21 to vote in national elections, but if you are a girl you could marry as a tween in some states without even parental consent. Even now adolescents can marry in “exceptional circumstances.” Today the age of consent is generally age 18, 17, or 16 for men and women in the US. But earlier in the century the age of consent was as low as 7, much lower for girls than boys who often were not restricted by age, and the laws did not become gender independent until 2015. Today it’s age 16 in Washington State and 18 in Oregon. California was the first state to contest the illegality of interracial marriage in 1948, so there was that too. fyi, I was nearly 22 and Gary was nearly 25 when we married, which seemed young to me then since women in my family generally married in their mid-20s.)

Forty-four years ago when we moved to the family beach house and began a family, I considered the possibility that we might not be capable of having children. We’d been trying for while. About 10% of couples then could not conceive. (That percentage is higher now.) I decided it would be okay to be childless. We were a good couple without children, and though I did not subscribe to the “this-is-no-world-to-bring-children” perspective, I have never liked too much medical intervention. No cosmetic surgery for me, I am what I am and it’s all that I am. Watching my weight, cutting my hair myself, and not even mascara anymore. Today I could chemically and surgically “correct” my gender, if I chose—but that makes no sense to this boomer. I am what I am. I have the historical perspective of seventy years and I am objectively fortunate in a racist country to have been born white and to educated parents, and perhaps less so having been born female and on the lower edge of middle-class. No judgement. It’s simply true. I have friends who are men (who suffer) and people of color (who suffer disproportionally and dramatically more), rich (less so) and poor or undereducated (absolute hardship). Thank goodness I am no longer required to wear skirts every day!

I have read recently that educators should not be so eager to push students to attend college. Let them be plumbers. I cannot disagree. (Please find me a smart plumber who chose not to go to college because he recognized he could earn a decent living in the trades!) On the other hand, a high school diploma might be a reasonable minimum. The work we do should be satisfying and rewarding. So long as we judge people’s humanity based on their background and profession, we’re not free.

Thomas Paine has vanished from school curriculums, though even in the 50s and 60s, he was standard fair. The Soviet Union collapsed but the world is not a safer place, though millions of citizens of that former “union” are now free to choose their political future, and most all are the better for having that choice. Russia has never supported a level playing field. Even their communism was smoke and mirrors. People who claw their way to the top are rarely interested in allowing, much less encouraging, others to do so. And Russia has a long and ugly history of suppression and poverty. I wrote a 30=page paper about that in high school. I do not miss typing.

From micro to macro, choice and prosperity are key to judging success. We should individually have the freedom to find our path, and we should be politically free to choose collective action (government) that supports us. All of us.

Many of my viewpoints are old-fashioned by now. I accept that. I am not unaware. My seventy-plus years give perspective, and that perspective tells me, among other things, that the world changes whether I want it to or not.

Times change? Yes, and my generation might do well to step aside while the younguns step up to make the world a better place.

It’s been done before.