Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The french have a proverb, quoted in the title, that loosely translated means that the more things change the more things stay the same. Poppycock the British say. And Au Contraire, I bellow to my fine feathered french friends. Not even close in this world. Change changes change, and things are not the same. It is a scary thought, but true just the same.

Change occurs in numerous, almost imperceptible quantities, and when each minutia of change is summed up, the total change is indisputably obvious. A case in point is Tim Cook's announcement this week.

Tim Cook, president of the most valued company in the world, Apple Computer,  is gay. That is not all, there are other increments of change have morphed into major adjustments in attitudes, interests and opinions.  For example, a black man is president and it is likely that our next president will be a white woman. When I was born, women had only been given the right to vote a few years earlier, black people were compelled to sit behind a bar in the back of a bus, and my Catholic school teachers, bless their little parochial hearts, taught me that gay people were going to hell.

Look around and speculate what attitudes we believe today are being subtly eroded and when enough small changes are accumulated, some years in the future, major change will have occurred again, contrary to the French proverb.

Maybe we can live without our iPhone. Unheard of!  As professor Henry Higgins would say.