I never watched The Simpsons, not even when it was supposedly great, and don’t care for really any animated shows. But this whole impulse to just throw everything in the rubbish bin because it didn’t get it all right (or it’s just of its times), I will never, ever understand.

Ideas age. Views change. Society alters. It doesn’t make everything that occurred more than five years ago evil. It doesn’t make the progressive-for-the-era become cross-burning Klanners by some malevolent transubstantion.

This is one of the few areas where I’ll pull age, as I think it matters here. The person who writes this blog is very young, I suspect. Probably no older than 28, most likely around 25, and unlike me probably wasn’t paying much attention to society at large when she was 10, as I was.

So I know that a lot changes in 30 years. A lot. I’ve seen ideas and policies go from extremely progressive to being considered raving conservative insanity. The same ideas. And I’ve seen the reverse, too. I’ve also witnessed something vacillate in my lifetime from being considered really ridiculously racist to extremely progressive — and then back again. And so much more.

It’s really tempting to have a Cultural Revolution and destroy everything that no longer matches the era’s bien pensant ideals, but it would be a mistake. It’s nearly always a mistake, and it’d be a mistake this time, too.