Revolutions take time.

It has taken the better part of a century for me to realize that some revolutions take generations to play out. Not only won’t I live to see them complete; neither will our children or grandchildren.

Take a topic not on Francine Hardaway’s list here: racial equality. To begin to achieve it in the U.S., we fought the Civil War. The result was various degrees of liberation for the people who had been slaves or already freed in Union states; but apartheid of both the de jure and de facto kind persisted. Jim Crow laws and practices emerged, and in still live on in culture if not also in law. The civil rights movement in the Fifties and Sixties caused positive social, political and other changes. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 especially helped. But the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in the late Sixties put civil rights almost back where it was before its revolution started. Small incremental improvements followed, but none in pace with the progress we had before those murders. We are still stuck with inequality for races, religions and so much else. Will we ever get over that? I think it’s inevitable, but it will take generations, provided our species survives.

One collateral victim of those murders in the Sixties was the near-end of nonviolence as a strategy toward change. Martin Luther King used it very effectively, and kept the flame alive and well-proven until violence took him out. Martyred though he was, it was not to the cause of nonviolence or pacifism, both of which have been back-burnered for fifty years. We (in the largest sense that includes future generations) may never find out if non-violence can ever succeed—because violence is obviously a deeply ingrained human trait.

I too was, and remain, a cyber-utopian. Or at least a cyber-optimist. But that’s because I see cyber—the digitization and networking of the world—as a fait accompli that offers at least as many opportunities for progress as it does for problems. As Clay Shirky says, a sure sign of a good technology is that one can easily imagine bad uses of it.

What I’m not writing at the moment are my thoughts about why some of those advantaged by power, even in small ways, abuse it so easily. I’m not writing it because I know whatever I say will be praised by some, rebuked by others, and either way will be reduced to simplicities that dismiss whatever subtle and complex points I am trying to make, or questions I am trying to ask. (Because my mind is not made up.) I also know that, within minutes for most of my piece’s readers, the points it makes will be gone like snow on the water, for such is the nature of writing on the vast sea of almost-nothing that “social” media comprises. And, as of today, all other media repose in the social ones.

Some perspective:

Compared to that, all other concerns shrink to insignificance. Except that they don’t. As The Onion said a few weeks after 9/11, A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again. Stupid bullshit is what the meteor of humanity hitting the planet cares most about. It’s also one big reason why it’s hard for us to get serious as a species about the serious problems we cause.

Geology—a science that takes the long view as a matter of course—is seriously considering re-naming the last ten thousand years the Anthropocene, because it’s an epoch in which the mark of one species is abundant in the geological record.

The only question that fully matters for us all is how we end the Anthropocene. Or how it ends without us.