In any community, there is always a gulf between high-principled ideals and prosaic realities, between promise and actual performance. Bermuda is no exception.

It’s now been almost a half-century since the modern Bermuda Constitution was promulgated. Committing the Island to the idea of equality before the law as well as the achievement of equality of opportunity as an everyday fact of life, the 1967 Bermuda Constitution Act is both the cornerstone and the capstone of the society we have built in the subsequent decades.

While we Bermudians are sometimes too easily convinced we are moving backward or, at best, moving in circles when it comes to achieving these goals, we have in fact been moving forward the whole while.

The reality is that in the past 48 years, we have done more to ensure and safeguard the liberties of all Bermudians and Bermuda residents than we had in the preceding four centuries.

Admittedly, change has taken place in a fits-and-starts manner and progress in the realm of social justice has sometimes been delayed; delayed but, ultimately, never denied.

Slowly but inexorably, the self-imposed and self-defeating barriers of prejudice, discrimination and injustice have been dismantled and removed.

Slowly but inexorably, Bermuda has been extending and enlarging the definitions of those freedoms so they apply to all of our people.

And, encouragingly, this trend has actually been accelerating in recent years.

For in a world being made ever smaller by technological progress and the realisation of a long-anticipated global village, progress in the areas of inclusivity, mutual acceptance and mutual respect has often followed.

The elimination of distance by modern communications systems and the increasing interdependence of widely scattered countries and cultures has resulted in a new closeness, a new familiarity with the once unfamiliar, a new acceptance of our common humanity and shared aspirations.

It’s not just the false masks we have long imposed on peoples in faraway places that are being stripped away.

Even in as small and compact a country as Bermuda, too many yawning cultural chasms tended to separate us in the past. These are now being bridged on an increasingly routine basis as a generation comes of age that has made common cause with our commonalities.

There is growing sensitivity and respect among young Bermudians for the diverse elements that make up the whole of this community; there is an understanding that our differences are sometimes what we actually share in common.

The coming generation, by and large, is far more accepting of the premise that everyone — whether a member of a majority racial or cultural group, a minority group or even a lone individual — has contributions to make and should be able to pursue their talents and fulfil their hopes and ambitions with the full protection and sanction of the community they live in.

Unlike some of their elders, Bermuda’s young people are acutely aware that any arbitrary abridgments of the basic freedoms guaranteed under the constitution to those seeking equal treatment under the law — gay people, women, the disabled or others — serve only to diminish us all.

The concerns of one are more likely to become the concerns of all in this emerging new Bermudian milieu, rather than pretexts for further divisiveness, conflict and entrenched intolerance.

There seems to be a shared determination among the greater part of our young people to preserve and protect the integrity and dignity of the individual.

The fanatics and zealots, like the poor, will of course always be with us.

But only the most myopic and uninformed of Bermuda’s people now fail to see beyond their immediate horizons; only the most wilfully ignorant cling to obsolete dogmas and ancient hatreds based on tribal, cultural or racial differences. And their numbers are thinning by the day.

In the almost 50 years since Bermuda adopted constitutionalism, we have repeatedly demonstrated that there is no fundamental inconsistency between embracing high ideals and finding and applying practical remedies to our social injustices.

This process has, at times, moved more slowly than many had hoped.

However, the arrival of a new generation eager to see a community in which the rights of all are respected and protected likely means that, going forward, social justice in Bermuda will not be delayed as regularly and as for long as it was in the past.