Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'
I grew up fairly conservative. A small country town with a tight-knit Christian family is not a place for anyone to grow. So when we moved to a bigger town, albeit just as redneck, and I grew older, my views changed. At the age of 12 I found out that gay people existed, and at 16 I discovered what the word transgender meant. As a young kid, raised to believe that God had made me exactly as he meant to, I was profoundly confused. A new world had been opened up to me and it was overwhelming but brilliant. Suddenly my opinions were my own. Despite how naive I ultimately was then, it didn’t take much for me to realise that my parents were completely wrong about so many things they preached.
But it also makes sense to me that my parents simply couldn’t see how the times had changed, that their world had grown so much from what they knew. After all, they both grew up in tiny country towns in Queensland. It was the 80’s and my parents didn't know any better. By the time they had grown up and started a family, their circles were still so small. Their youths weren't spent, to my knowledge, discovering the world around them. They were spent building walls around their beliefs, protecting them from anything that may challenge them.
Most conservatives spend a lot of their time criticising things they don’t understand. Rather than spending their time reading and learning and growing as people, they stop believing in change. The fear of the world they once knew changing stops them from changing. Staying strong to their values is so much easier than having everything they once knew turned on it’s head. Which makes sense. Of course change is scary. Everything you once believed in being questioned is undoubtedly scary. Anything that may threaten a person’s individual belief system is easily rejected. But, as it always has, society was made to change. Change is the only reason we have survived. As terrifying as it may seem, it’s necessary. People aren’t simple and they certainly aren’t steadfast in anything they are or do. So society changes too.
Conservatism is rooted in tradition and simplicity, and while these things are important (to an extent) they don’t allow for progress. The world will continue to grow, and whether we survive is based on our willingness to accept this shift. Barely a hundred years ago, it was common sense that a woman was unable to make her own decision. Hundreds of years ago, we believed the world was flat.
If we want this world to be liveable, we must make it liveable. It’s too easy to be overwhelmed into inaction in response to the world around us. We need to put in the work if we want to learn how to adapt to change. The longer we stay stuck in our ways, the further we regress as a society. The change is inevitable, but we get to choose how easily we let it pass.