Culture Change

Shortly after my election to the School Board,  the outgoing president, warned me that I would often hear those words.

Then the superintendent of the school district, warned me.

I believed them, and I didn’t want to believe them—like when your doctor suggests that the time has come for you to renounce your nightly dose of pie a la mode.

But they were right. And I wasn’t even officially a member of the Board when I heard the words they had warned me about.

That is a change in culture.

This phrase was spoken during a discussion of whether to install door-locking mechanisms in our elementary schools and, it appears to me, that it was used as an argument against the tightened security.

I was stunned when I heard the phrase—not because of the pros and cons of the measure being considered, an issue best left to another time—but because it was stunning that anyone could believe the observation, You’re-Changing-The-Culture, could represent an argument for or against anything.

Still, here it was, being used in response to a proposal, even though, You’re-Changing-The-Culture, is in reality a non-argument, since it tells us nothing other than that people don’t like change—a facet of human nature so apparent that long ago someone made up a ten-dollar word for it: Misoneism, the hatred of new things.

Logic demands that we counter the phrase by asking if a change in the prevailing culture might be necessary.

For example, in the United States women were denied the right to vote until 1920 and the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. This was a profound culture-change and represented a giant leap forward.

On the other hand, the progressive Weimar Republic was in charge of Germany until Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power. This, too, would turn out to be a change in culture and proved to be a backward somersault into years of unspeakable horror.

By definition, the words, "cultural change," are unrelated to the quality of the change itself. The words simply describe the shifting of the status quo.

On the surface this would seem obvious, and yet, frequently and regrettably, this doesn’t appear to be the case.

In the instance of the school-board discussion, I don’t believe that culture-change was cited with malevolent intentions, but on occasion, throughout history, it has been used to incite hatred.

In the 1850s, the Know-Nothing political party used it as a charge against the waves of Irish arriving on our shores. As noted in the Web encyclopedia, Wikipedia, these Irish immigrants, with their own traditions and devout Roman Catholicism, were "seen as a threat to maintaining American culture."

A century later, the non-argument reappeared during the Civil Rights era, when segregationists in the South claimed that integration represented a change in their region’s long-standing tradition of "separate but equal."

Of course, the overwhelming majority of us don’t use culture-change as a rationalization for attacking our neighbors, but to some degree, in each of us, misoneism persists, a common flaw of our humanity.

Whenever we sense ourselves in its grip we would be wise to remember what President John F. Kennedy told us: "Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."

Keeping that in mind, we may come to see that the phrase, You’re-Changing-The-Culture, has no place in the discussions of a school board—no place, anywhere, in a nation that looks with hope toward tomorrow, celebrates diversity, and cherishes democracy.