Gray matters.

This desire to categorize everything neatly as either right or wrong; good or evil; liberal or conservative--it makes me nuts.

I'm a little bit wrapped around my axle, so this is likely to come out as a giant mess. But that's part of the fun!

The frustration I'm feeling has to do with this unnecessary and yet powerful belief that we must pick one side of an issue and then cling to it as if it alone is keeping us tethered on the earth. The attitude of, "Yer either fer me, er yer agin' me."

Shouldn't we try to examine all sides of an issue before rendering judgment on it? Before choosing a side? Can't we take a step back and try to grasp the larger context?

Life is not a great, big game of Red Rover. We shouldn't be lined up across from each other, side versus side, trying to prevent differing opinions from breaking through our ranks.

I can't even remember what made me think of this today. I had intended to write about how, as much as I respect Ayn Rand as an author, I could do without the diatribes in her novels. I mean, if I haven't figured out her message in the first 800 pages of Atlas Shrugged, I really don't think a 60-page radio address from John Galt is going to help. And, if it does, why not just write the 60 pages and be done with it? As an educated reader and an independent thinker, I was a little insulted. Same thing in The Fountainhead, during Howard Roark's trial. I knew what he thought about all that in the first five pages of the book.

Ah, that was it. I wanted to make the point that taste is an not all-or-nothing situation. That I can enjoy Rand's novels and respect her as a writer and a thinker, even if I don't like or agree with everything about them.

Was that so hard?