...plus c'est la même chose. Coined by Jean-Baptiste Alphone Karr, the French phrase has entered the English vocabulary, usually abbreviated to its first three words. Idiomatically translated as "The more things change, the more they remain the same" it was a reflection on the immutability of human nature.
Nowhere is this more evident than the yammering about "Cancel culture," most notably from the right but also to a noticeable (but enormously lower) level from all parts of the political spectrum.
Most of you are not old enough to remember a time when it was perfectly socially acceptable to be prejudiced against blacks, hispanics, women, jews, catholics or any other religious, ethnic or sexual group that was "not us" - a straight, caucasian, protestant, English-speaking male.
There are more generations alive in this world today that grew up in times where words like the N-word, but also "wog", "paki", "chink", "kike", "poof", "spic", "dyke" etc have been regarded as unacceptable in polite conversation than there are who grew up hearing them all the time. This is causing us to lose sight of the fact that as little as half a century ago these words could be used in everyday conversation without anyone batting an eye. They were regarded as "crude", to be sure, but not "offensive." I'm closing in on my 60th birthday with unsettling speed and in my early years I heard them every day - even as the child of progressive, hippie, parents - not from my parents so much but from their social circle, the other adults whose interaction with a young child tends to shape their social views, teach them about interactions outside the family.
My parents generation and mine changed the world. Not by eliminating these words but by promulgating and embracing the concept that the attitude they embodied was wrong. Disqualified from the front lines of feminism by my Y-chromosome, I nonetheless learned and accepted that it was not OK to discriminate against women, and the deeper truth that expecting a woman to be "just the same" as a man was also discriminatory, a kind of back-handed equality that said "if you want to be equal, act like a man" in the same way as communities of color were told "if you want to be equal, act white." Likewise excluded from the front lines of the Civil Rights movement by my white privilege I still learned and accepted that the color of someone's skin and the culture they grew up in did not make them any less my equal as a human being.
And there was pushback. Oh, Lord, was there ever pushback. The disavowal of these prejudiced attitudes was labelled a fad called "political correctness", subject to endless bloviation by politicians and talking heads, the object of comedy sketches, outright ridicule in the press. On the one hand held up as a lunatic fringe and on the other portrayed as a sinister threat to the very fabric of society. Well, in one sense I suppose it was a threat to that fabric - but only to the pieces of it that were so moth-eaten and rotten that they needed cutting out and darning or patching over.
Sounds pretty familiar to you younger folks, doesn't it? I bet you're hearing echoes of "woke" being "their" new term of derision, of being attacked for a "cancel culture" if you dare say that an outdated attitude is not OK any more and you won't participate in perpetuating it.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
But don't let it get you down. If they are bothering to attack you like this, they are afraid that you're winning. That the changes you are making are real and will last. Stay "woke." "Cancel" their reactionary screeds every chance you get, deprive them of their megaphones.
Because you ARE winning, and they know it. We couldn't cut out all the rot, so there's still all this for you to do, but you're succeeding. You may, as you live through your own second half-century on this Earth and my generation has all shuffled off to the boneyard long since, see your children and grandchildren having to carry on the task for you, just as you are doing for us. Whatever new term of derision the opposition may come up with for them, remind them in your turn that it's an old, old, story and put your hand on their shoulders as they write their chapter of it.