**NOTE: It feels incredibly disingenuous to continue to call this a daily journal. I want to get myself to the point where I have something to post about each day, and actually do so, but until then, I’m renaming this: now it’s just a journal.
As a child, my father always taught me to never speak in absolutes, and – though I’ve never been good at following that advice – I believe in it totally. (See what I did there?)
Seriously, though, he had a really good point. Take one of the current hot-button political topics right now – voter fraud in the 2020 election. One side says there was no fraud. ZERO fraud. Not one person knowingly choosing to vote, despite their ineligability. In a country of over 300 million, many of whom are more fanatic about their politics than their sports, I do NOT believe that. The other side says that there was SO much voter fraud that it actually altered the outcome of the election…. the amount of fraud required for that is STAGERING, and I do NOT believe that either.
If that’s the argument, it will never be solved, because both sides are so obviously wrong. But now, anyone who compromises even the slightest bit – like a conservative (like me) who says, sorry, Trump didn’t win the election, even if I wanted him to at the time, and he acted like a child afterwards. An absolutely spoiled child, throwing a massive temper tantrum, with a ton of armed people behind him. Absolutes aren’t just unhelpful, they aren’t just destructive to civillity, common decency and democracy. They can kill.
There is subtlety in all things. Very little in this world is all one thing or another… I would posit that only God himself is soley good, the rest of us are all varying shades of grey. Maybe the reason that we are so uncomfortable with these shades of grey in our lives is because we are uncomfortable with the shades we see within ourselves. We want to see ourselves as
GOOD.
KIND.
LOVING.
STRONG.
INDEPENDENT.
So many of us want to hold to one or more of these as solid identifiers of who we are. But we’re not always that way, every second of every day. We ALL have hate, cruelty, meanness, greed, selfishness, pride, and misery in us, right next to all those goods. And even the people we see as the worst have aspects of good in them. Take the Hezbollah leader who was recently killed. Our government was quick to tell the world of the American blood on his hands, of the atrocities that he directed. But I also heard a story on the radio of a Lebanese woman who was shouting at the sea, crying, asking where he had gone, begging him to come back, because to her, he was a protector, a man who had her and her loved ones’ best interests at heart. To his wife, he may have been her best friend. We don’t know. But every single person matters. Everyone counts. And everyone has room for growth, room for healing, room for reconciliation, room for understanding. We all need to try to find that room within ourselves, inhabit it, and expand it.
