Sometimes, when I watch disability ad campaigns, I want to throw my hands in the air, give up and go and get a job serving coffee. The last one I wrote about was one that tried to raise funds and awareness for prevention, rehabilitation and cure of spinal cord injuries. 

The latest little gem is the Australian CP Society's attempt to raise awareness of long waiting lists for funding for equipment to support kids with CP. Instead of saying "disabled kids need your help because bureaucracy is inefficient and you might as well make a donation and make your tax dollar go somewhere useful," some half baked advertising exec has come up with a heart-wrenching diatribe of worrisome, fearful, world-shattering, devastating, agonising testimony from weary parents, with the pay off that this is not so bad except they have to wait so long for equipment. Take a look:

It's a long way away from disability rights, strategies, UN Conventions and the like. It feels like going back to the dark ages. It is ironic and dialectical that while disabled people chain themselves to busses to fight for rights, charities like the CP Society reduce disabled kids to helpless, vulnerable waifs in order to raise funds for equipment.

I may as well serve coffee than think any amount of social change strategies will change this anomaly any time soon. It won't. The fact is social change doesn't result in a neat curve of evolutionary progress as we might like to think:

That would be easy and ideal and we would all be ascended masters wondering what to do in the blinding glare of enlightenment.

I find it more realistic to think of social change and evolution as more of a pig's tail or, if thrill is your thing, a rollercoaster perhaps:

We move forward socially and evolve and then, because of our didactic political system, fear of change, capitalist greed and a whole lot of things we swing back and start regressing. Change literally goes backwards (we hear all the time people saying it feels like that) and our collective evolution slows and even regresses.

But then the tide changes, politics liberalises, markets steady and we begin progressing again.

In these cycles we feel like we reach times of huge progression when we are in times of forward change, innovation and evolutionary heights, but then the opposite when, on a "backslide" we reach a similar position (as indicated by the arrows.

Indeed this is a simplistic representation of a highly complex dynamic that happens on many levels. It happens at the macro scale of humanity, on country scales, in cultures, religions, politics, communities and, of course, in individuals. 

Different parts of society are at different places on the loops. But, I do believe and trust, that we are on an uphill trajectory overall.

It doesn't tell the whole story of social change and evolutionary progress, but it may explain why our social landscape is often so contradictory.

Not to mention why I don't have a job making coffee...