Where did gray go? It's supposed to be somewhere between black and white. It must be lost. I can't find it anywhere.
I listen to the radio for it, but to no avail. Call-in and talk radio, seemingly inherently ultra-conservative, don't have any gray. The few ultra-liberal shows don't possess it either.
TV won't help. Ever since Shana Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick squared off in their "Point-Counterpoint" vignettes over 20 years ago, everybody's got an edge, an agenda.
Controversy sells. It excites and ignites. Ratings soar. Producers and advertisers are happy. But what about viewers and listeners?
We're told, at least through these media lens, that complex issues are very simple. Black or white. Right or wrong. Sane or crazy.
Before my attentive band of fan hurls the label hypocrite at me, I like simplicity, too. I tend to write about that which I feel is more right than not, more sensible, more reasonable, etc. I can live with absolutes. The 10 commandments list some pretty good ones. Despite mitigating human weaknesses and motives like lust, greed, envy, pride, and anger, I can buy into their black and white messages.
As entertaining as folks like Dr. Laura and Rush Limbaugh can be, they can be equally infuriating when they fail to accept or validate the many competing priorities -- the gray areas -- which we face every day.
I can live with a person choosing an absolute after considering the circumstances surrounding her dilemma. I understand about hearing the other side. I'm a parent. I do it all the time. But once one of my little ones explains her or his position, I usually conclude with some variation of the obligatory parental absolute: "Because I said so."
As much as I'd like to see gray more often, it can be intellectually challenging and lead to severe headaches.
Go back to the 10 commandments. There was a story on NPR about childless married Jewish women in Israel accepting sperm from U.S. Christians for artificial insemination to avoid committing adultery. If a Jewish donor were used, sin was guaranteed. Here's a gray area that went through years of intense Rabbinical debate before rendering a simplistic answer. Of course, this raises more questions than I could address in a basic 700-word article.
It'd be nice to view and live life by periodically invoking one absolute or another. Of course, that's what we do most of the time without realizing it. Life, however, more resembles rambling discussions from a philosophy or ethics class than it does the neatly scripted messages we get in socially-motivated sitcoms or TV series.
What's so exasperating and downright confusing is that folks must choose some absolutes (morals, ethics) and fashion their lives around them. Otherwise, our psyches and behaviors would be bouncing from pillar to post. We wouldn't be able to decide what to order at McDonald's let alone know whether it's morally appropriate to go there in the first place. We simply wouldn't be able to function.
Of course, the problem is that absolutes absolutely absolve us of any compassion or balance. Without the gray, we can't hear people cry for help or lend them a hand out of the abyss. We'd never accommodate struggling children trying to stand on their own two feet and walk the straight and narrow.
You see what happens with gray? It's messy. It gives the leeway and latitude we crave, yet it fails to provide the needed rationale and direction to justify our actions, quirks, and beliefs.
How can we reconcile black, white, and gray? Using phrases like "It depends" and "On the other hand" help. Such utterances force us to pause and consider. They allow some degree of open-mindedness, debate, and introspection.
Just as a series of gray, cloudy days depress us, hanging around life's gray areas too long wear us down.
Don't fear. Whenever you're at your wits end, turn on the radio or TV and find a pundit. That shouldn't hard. There's a surfeit number of them. Soon you'll be safely lodged in the world of absolutes, soothed by simple truths.
You won't have to worry about gray anymore.
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Fred W. Apelquist, III, M.Ed.
Approximately 695 words.
(c) 2001