Monday, December 10, 2012

Monday Musings: All or Nothing


Statements that start with “all” or “always” are usually wrong.   

All killing is wrong.  It sounds great.  “Thou shall not kill.”  Problem is, sometimes it is necessary.  And the thing is, no one really disagrees … but still lots of folks say that abortion is wrong simply because it involves killing.  It might be wrong, but if so it is because it is not an instance when we can justify killing and not because it involves killing.

All taxes are bad.  This sounds great too, until you realize that without taxes there is no collective and no society.  If we don’t contribute to the collective, why should we have a collective?  And, for the record … the Boston Tea Party was about taxation WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.  Just so you know, we have representation now.

Anything now done by the government could be more effectively done by private enterprise.  The free market is always the answer.  This is all silliness.  It is hard to see how anybody could believe any of this.  It is clear that the key to economic success is a partnership between government and business, and instead of wasting our time in the realm of absolute silliness, we should be talking about what the ideal nature of this collaboration should be.  As far as the free market goes, that was debunked long ago as the ideal solution to every problem.  Need I say “child labor’ or Upton Sinclair?

All Muslims are terrorists in waiting.  The truth is, if you are going to go with this than there are some equally unflattering things we ought to say about Christians.  And we better not get started on all White Folks.

I think you get the idea.  The world has a bit of nuance to it.  It can be frustrating, but it is the truth.  Dealing with the truth, leads us to cooperation, collaboration, compromise, and solutions.  Living in a black and white fantasy world leads to self righteous satisfaction and one impasse after the other.  I’ll take the truth, at least most of the time.

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