It was the briefest of observations, an exchange that lasted no more than two seconds, and yet it has stayed with me ever since. CB and I were on Boston’s Silver Line, on our way to the airport, and eventually to New York City. It was, apparently, a popular day for travel and the seats had already filled up by the time a mother carrying a young toddler, and trailed by an aging grandfather, climbed aboard and navigated between the labyrinth of suitcases and backpacks. If I had seen her earlier I promise I would have offered my seat, but she was already several yards down the bus when a black college-aged girl with tightly plaited braids smiled up at the struggling mom and offered her seat.

In what I have come to regard as standard Boston crabbiness the woman muttered, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ Then she glanced back at her father – who looked just a few months shy of needing a walker – and added with a softer tone, ‘But maybe for my dad, if you don’t mind.’ I’m not the best at gauging age, but I would say that grandpa had to be at least 75, if not 80. He looked, and spoke, just like Walter Matthau right before his death.

The college student stood up, ready to give up her seat, but grandpa waved her back down. “No, no, you stay seated. I’ll be just fine.” And he continued trudging his way to the back of the bus where he joined his daughter and granddaughter, holding on the the poles to steady his balance.

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The reason the brief exchange between the grandpa and the college student has stayed with me ever since is that the life experience leading up to those two seconds has been so different for each one. Assuming that grandpa was 75 years old, that means that he was born in 1934, at the dawn of the New Deal, Hitler’s rise to Führer of Germany, and the beginning of the Long March of the Chinese Communists. He was 21 years old – likely a college student – when Rosa Parks was found guilty and fined $14 for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. I wonder what his reaction was to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Where was he – as a 30-year-old – during Freedom Summer in Mississippi? Did he cry when Martin Luther King was assassinated? Sadly, I am not able to look back at his weblog to find out, but I am fairly certain that a young black woman giving up her seat on a bus fits into a different context for him than it does for her.

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There was a recent article in the New York Times about improved race relations since Obama took power which, for those of us who grew up in multicultural urban surroundings, seems laughably quaint. For example, this line:

“I go to a gym where there are a number of black people,” Mr. Schmidt said. “We don’t often communicate. They tend to have their own circle of friends. But now, there’s been more communication. Now you have an opener. After the election, I started saying hello. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think of Obama, about our new president?’ ”

Hence Jelani Cobb‘s rephrasing of the headline: “Obama Wins, White People Speak to Black Ones.” As quaint as the New York Times article may be, the poll that led to its publication is indicative of just how little exposure most white Americans had to black Americans. Familiarity may breed contempt, as the saying goes, but ignorance breeds bigotry.

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And what if James F. Blake, the Montgomery bus driver who told Rosa Parks to give up her seat and then pressed charges against her, had a blog? What would it reveal about the man? What were his thoughts about serving as an American in Europe during WWII, a war which, for many, had nothing to do with this country? Would he have ever mentioned the day in 1943, probably just after returning from the war, in which he cruelly left Rosa Parks to walk home in the rain? Or, 12 years later, when the same middle-aged black seamstress refused to give up her seat (“No. I’m tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.”)? And how would his blog have changed in the 19 years that followed during which time he remained an employee of the Montgomery City Bus Lines? Did his views on race change along with the rest of the country?

Despite that history has tended to be the story of the oppressors, we know much more about Rosa Parks’ life than we will ever know about James F. Blake. I guess that says something about who, in the end, were victors of that particular battle.

According to the Guardian’s Blake obituary:

Looking back on his unintended eruption into history years later, Blake said defensively: “I wasn’t trying to do anything to that Parks woman except do my job. She was in violation of the city codes, so what was I supposed to do? That damn bus was full and she wouldn’t move back. I had my orders.”

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We all like to think that our ethics and values today meet the expectations of future generations, and that, had we lived in the past, we would not have stood by and watched as Native Americans were exterminated, Nazis killed Jews, and Blacks were treated as second-class citizens. That our individual ethics somehow trump social norms. That we would have been among the small minority who protested during Stanley Milgram’s famous “Obedience to Authority” experiment. There is only one way to know, however, and that is to judge our actions today against the ethics that govern society 50 years from now.

I am fairly certain that fifty years from now the vast majority of our grandchildren will look back at those who protested against gay marriage as wrong, if not bigoted. Fortunately, I’m safe there. (HP, not so much.) They will also probably judge the carbon footprint that we left behind. There, with all my jet-setting, I don’t fare so well.

What I have been wrestling with over the past few days, however, is whether or not humanity is on a moral journey from the raping and pillaging of our past to an eventual vegetarian society of the future. One of many lenses through which to see the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries is as an ever-widening circle affording the same rights to groups that had previously been excluded: slaves, lower castes, certain races, nationalities, poor, women, handicapped, gays. By law, if not in practice, nearly all of these groups are now afforded the same basic rights as the others. Our moral trajectory seems to be one of empathy, and already the animal rights groups want to widen the circle further to other species of the animal kingdom. “Animal Law” is now taught at 110 out of 180 law schools in the United States.

After the Gay Rights movement eventually (and finally) achieves its objectives, will the animal rights movement become the next (and last) to extend fundamental rights to a formerly excluded group? Will they judge the meat-eaters of today like the James Blakes of our recent past?

I have no idea. I can’t predict what my children or their children will believe in and fight for. But if they judge me as cruel for that gigantic steak I just ate with Pablo I ask them to read Michael Pollan’s essay in the New York Times, “An Animal’s Place,” and to (hopefully) realize that the ethics behind humans eating meat are both complicated and confusing.