Radical Change Often Looks Tame in Hindsight

Today, being sick to death of campaign speeches, and completely unable to tell who might win or lose the upcoming election, I turned my sights over to Arts and Letters Daily hoping that they'd have something for me to sink my mind into that wasn't about military mistakes, or Senatorial voting records, or lies coming from both sides of the fence.

What I found was this lovely, yet incredibly long article by Bruce Bawer in the Wilson Quarterly. It contains, amongst the 18 million other ideas that it encompasses, the following quote:

In The New Yorker for November 30, 1963, the first issue of that magazine to appear after the assassination, the memorial article ended with the observation that “when we think of him, he is without a hat.” Ever since, it has been difficult to picture any of our chief executives with a hat.

Men used to wear hats! Every day! And the concept of a man not wearing a hat in public used to be radical! I mean, I get that the concept of women having a job outside the home used to be radical*, but bearing your hair to the elements was a new idea? Wow.

This article goes on and on about many things that we now take for granted that, at the time, seemed like crazy departures from the norm, but in the context of the couple of years that happened right before all the upheaval happened. It makes me wonder what we're going to classify as "naive" when we look back at today, 40 years from now.