2004-09-14 - 5:41 p.m.
Sometimes I feel like I am the person people are describing when they call John Kerry (the current Democratic Party Presidential Nominee) a flip-flopper. Only, it is not in the things I do or say that this reasoning is manifest. It is in the things I think. Most of my life, I have insisted on looking at both sides of issues, regardless of the severity or moral prejudices comprising them. However, recently I have found that if you carry out the line of thinking far enough, and if you actually sympathise with those whose reasoning compels them to support the less logical or less popular point of view on the issue, you run into the conundrum of understanding and actually semi-agreeing with both sides. Now, that is not to say that it happens every time I contemplate an issue. Often-times logic compels me to say that my initial gut reaction was the correct one and even though I understand the other, I find the logical flaws it contains to be its undoing. But when something involves lives and is not necessarily morally superior either way, I "flip-flop" and must stand behind both points of view. I hate to think that people would take this as a form of my insecurity or, worse yet, indecisiveness, but I imagine people who have the sensibility to step outside of themselves, to put themselves into the shoes of others, whether friend, foe or whatever else, and to really imagine what it must mean to that person(s) that other side of the issue, that those people come accross this dilemma every once in a while. It tests one's mettle, to challenge one's self and the morally-righteous, self-affirming point of view. After all, it makes us who we are, especially as we grow older, to be firm about what we stand for. But to be closer to each other, as human beings, and to resolve conflict with a more open mind and malleable prospective, and to approach the issues of our daily lives with the expectation to have a paradigm shift, we must accept that everyone can be right in their own way and that it should not immediately invite conflict from our side when something someone else does or says goes against what we know (or think we know) or believe. It may even be that something that we have done, ourselves, may have triggered the opposition of the other side of that issue, and we must be open to the idea that we may just be wrong.
P.S. my new roommate rocks.
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"In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others"
--Andre Maurois
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