a place that people can't be bothered with

Dan Dare #7, Virgin Comics, July 2008. Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine.

This is one of the reasons I'll always have time for Garth Ennis; he has an odd ability to articulate things that I hadn't quite found the words for yet.

There's a tendency in left-wing/social justice circles to accentuate the negative. This is not to say that the negative does not exist, or that it's at all outweighed by the positive; issues such as the death of Mike Brown, both the act itself and the reactions to it (i.e. the orbital fracture myth), prove that we still have a long way left to go as a culture. In my darker moments, I think it'll require an external enemy or a mass extinction before we stop clinging to old tribal allegiances.

That aside, it's easy for modern-day liberals to forget that it's only been fifty years since the civil rights movement. Many people who worked to begin it are still with us, and many of those who actively opposed it are still here as well. Colored-only water fountains and Rosa Parks are still within living memory.

And yeah, there are a lot of ways in which things still suck, but turn it around and it's actually kind of amazing how much progress we've made. A mixed-race man got elected President (and in so doing seems to have driven large parts of the country insane, but that's neither here nor there), Neil deGrasse Tyson is pretty much the current face of American science, and if you're a kid into sports, there's probably a poster of a black guy on your wall, no matter what your personal racial background is.

We've backslid in some serious ways, but we're still moving forward, despite the best attempts of a lot of the retrograde elements of the larger culture. Pop culture right now is weirdly regressive, yeah, but one of the big takeaway points from the 2012 election is that that regressive tendency is a death rattle: it's a product of fear in the face of a coming massive demographic shift.

This shouldn't shut anyone down, but there's a bizarre tendency among progressives of all stripes to wallow in guilt and shame, to sit around and bemoan the state of culture while ignoring the ways in which it has gotten and is getting better. Wallowing doesn't help. Acknowledge the good along with the bad, improve on the good, and keep moving.