When I was a kid, we liked our bread white, our clothing to be artificial and we wanted everybody to be white, middle class, protestant, not an immigrant - and a man.
Times have changed - we prefer wholewheat bread, prefer natural to synthetic and we welcome diversity and speak of vibrant communities made of all kinds of different people.
And we don't medically label school kids as morons and cretins, as they did in my schools - we don't beat aboriginal kids who dare to speak MicMac.
Times have changed - we are kinder and gentler to others - we call this change the shift from Modernity to PostModernity.
PoMo in the 'in jargon' for all this - a way of making all the big words in the postmodernist toolbox - and there are lots of them - seem a little more downhome and friendly.
But when did the transition from Mo to Po start ?
My partner, Michael, thinks it happened between September 2nd 1939 and September 2nd 1945.
PoMo is often seen as an aesthetic thing, of interest only to avant garde artists and young architects.
Michael - characteristically - thinks this is 180 degrees wrong.
"The Mo-Po Revolution was above all a change in general morality or ethics throughout the Western World - starting in 1945, we quickly decided it wasn't polite anymore to make fun of Jews, or Negroes, or Indians, or DPs ,Hunkies and Polacks."
"Nor to make fun of retards and crips, immigrants, gals in the office and fruits."
If Modernity's mantra was "Some life is unworthy of life", postmodernity said, in effect, "all life is worthy of life".
"And a little respect and dignity."
Michael thinks it was this inchoate movement during World War Two, that pushed Martin Henry Dawson to break a wartime regulation at the age of 46 - to break a rule for probably the first time in his life.
He kept on breaking the rules until he changed our whole world for the better, forever...
Michael's new blog is called
MO goes PO - check it out !!
