>> the "politically correct zealotry" of my generation is now widely understood to have been on the correct side of history
Maybe you're right, but if you were in that kind of wave - I guess you mean the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, not the widely mocked PC movement of the 80s? - you were exceptionally lucky from a world-historical point of view. Currently, the same words might also be uttered by one of the hostage takers in the Iranian revolution, any member of the Taliban, or one of the older prison guards at a concentration camp in Xinjiang. (Really. Imagine each of those people saying that sentence). Point being, those words usually sound absurd to anyone who doesn't share your political and cultural frame of reference.
Maybe you're right, but if you were in that kind of wave - I guess you mean the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, not the widely mocked PC movement of the 80s? - you were exceptionally lucky from a world-historical point of view. Currently, the same words might also be uttered by one of the hostage takers in the Iranian revolution, any member of the Taliban, or one of the older prison guards at a concentration camp in Xinjiang. (Really. Imagine each of those people saying that sentence). Point being, those words usually sound absurd to anyone who doesn't share your political and cultural frame of reference.