I was browsing through the usual news sites and ran across this link to Linus Torvald's blog. He's the creator of the Linux Operating System, and sometime these geniuses have something useful to say. I liked the way these two paragraphs are formed:
"The reason has always been that I don't like single-issue people,
nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and
white are very nice or ultimately very useful. The fact is, there
aren't just two sides to any issue, there's almost always a range
or responses, and "it depends" is almost always the right answer
in any big question. And not being even willing to see the other
side makes for bad decisions.
Don't get me wrong - I love seeing people who are really
passionate about what they do, and many people have something
they really care about. It's just that when that becomes something exclusionary, it often gets ugly. It's not passion for something,
it becomes passion against something else."
http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html
It's the way Linus Torvald uses the "for" word that caught my attention, but more so because he included the age old polarity of "against" to match and balance the "for". As the mountain folk are reputed to say, "Boys, yer either fer sumthin or agin it. Take yo' choice, and then be willing to die fer it." The author doesn't mention dying "agin" something, just dying "fer" it.
I haven't paid that much attention to the "for" part of that polarity until I started reading Sartre a year or so ago. It's impossible for me to ignore it now. It's easier to spot it in writing than to pick it up in situ with all the other stuff going on.
The way Torvald put it with "for" and "against" set up as a reaction to passion, I suspect this attitude of "it depends" could work pretty much across the board when you're dealing with emotional issues.
The dark scenario I'm envisioning involves fictitious visits in the early morning hours by government types. Even in that sort of situation humans still hear people say what they might have said, and humans still see what they subjectively figure is out there, so if one's response to a life or death question by those dispassionate visitors gives you more ti-me to figure out their true motive, then any plausible moment of uncertainty could be a blessing rather than a curse.
There are a lotta younger men who are older than me, and there are a lotta older men who are younger than me, but whether older or younger it's still possible for a startling epiphany to appear, in which it can be realized without forgetting, that there is only so much time for any of us to "tell it all, brothers and sisters, before the Fall."
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
