The world has turned, and it isn’t turning back

*

Two nights ago, we ate at Aga’s Restaurant in Sugarland, just outside Houston, Texas.

The WE were six white Americans who differed by age, gender, profession, and family status but shared a visible skin tone that differed from the overwhelmingly Indian and Pakistani crowd.

Aga’s advertises itself as the “#1 Indian-Pakistani Restaurant in North America.”

The proof of its claim was in our waiting time (90 minutes), the number of people in Aga’s three serving rooms when we sat down (500), and the excellent, authentic dishes.

Because of that waiting time, I walked through Aga’s three rooms to get to the toilet when we were seated. White faces made up roughly 5% of the patrons.

*

Similarly, Jenny Boucek, who you see in the first photo, is not the only woman coaching in America’s National Basketball Association. Currently, there are six female assistant coaches. (source)

Each of the 30 NBA teams is allowed three assistants. Below are the three Indiana Pacers assistants surrounding Head Coach Rick Carlisle at The Houston Rockets Indiana Pacers game a week ago.

The NBA assistant coaching room seats 90, so Coach Boucek and the five other women coaches make up a little under 6%.

The four Indiana Pacer coaches had just finished barking at a foul called on one of their players by this referee.

Dannica Mosher is one of eight female NBA referees. (source)

Out of 74.

11%

*

I’m a 74-year-old white male, heterosexual as well. I was born in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson stood alone in the batter’s box in American Major League Baseball.

My Catholic compatriot, John F. Kennedy, would break another barrier before I started high school.

When I looked back at my 1967 high school yearbook, I discovered no “girls” sports teams, only this.

Weirdly, I don’t recall a single conversation with friends, parents, or teachers about girls not having teams. Or not being coaches or refs.

Two nights after Obama was elected President of the United States, I sat next to my son, Ben, at a concert listening to Bob Dylan sing Blowin’ in the Wind.

My tears were not the only ones in the concert hall.

*

Whites in a sea of Browns, women amidst men, and a Black man joins an exclusive club.

All in my lifetime.

I felt completely at ease at Aga’s.

Boucek yelled at Mosher, who yelled back.

Obama was reelected.

*

None of this was easy.

Or finished.

And some forces are pushing back.

This competition — about change and inclusion — is now the defining feature of American politics.

But the reactionaries will lose.

Today, too many see all of this and more, not as change but as ordinary.

The way things are.

When I mentioned my Aga and Houston Rockets’ takeaways to a family member a generation younger, he looked puzzled. He didn’t notice either because he sees them all the time.

I notice them because they are new to me.

Bob Dylan, of course, was right in Blowin’. It always takes too damn long to do the right thing.

And he was prescient about all times.

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’