Another shade of grey

I think you're mistaking "conviction" with "hard-headedness." I mean, you'd be hard-frickin-put to find a person that has ever conversed with me for longer than 6.73 seconds that would tell you I was not the sort to hold many opinions or to be less than outspoken about those. And there are some, certainly, that I feel okay being pretty black and white about (gay marriage = yay!, rapists & child molesters (especially the latter) really have no business remaining in society, abortion should always be legal, bush is an idiot, people who abuse animals ought to have to suffer the same fate they bestowed on those helpless creatures, etc.) - but even in those circumstances I can see some grey (um, well, sometimes anyway.)

Like, in general, I'm against the death penalty. I agree that it's a pretty hypocritical thing to do, and it doesn't help that the people who are enormously pro-capital-punishment appear to be nearly entirely composed of ass. That said, I have no problem saying that if I had a kid, and someone molested him or her, you best believe that that person would do well to get their corporeal self as far away from me as possible and remain so until the end of their days, because I WOULD kill them. At the absolute very least, I would proceed to attempt to cause them to be killed by any available means. And also that I just don't see any good reason for them to stay alive. What good does it do to keep them in the gene pool?

Anyway. Being able to see both sides of an issue doesn't mean that one lacks conviction, it means that one is intelligent and empathetic. There are very few issues that don't have some level of variability on either side. For me, the grey in capital punishment is child molesters; for many more right-leaning folk, the grey in the abortion debate is pregnancies that are the result of a rape. There's always a circumstance (okay, almost always) where the answers are not as clear-cut, even if we can't see it at the moment.

what she said.

I had this long balbidy-boo to say and then I realized katie had beat me to it. dang she tricksy.

;-)

Hee. That just reminded me of something.

A couple years ago my company had just landed the Biggest Account of Our Lives - a Fortune 500 company, huge name, big publicity. (my company is very small - never more than 12 people total)

They also happened to be one of the single most conservative outlets in the country. Still are. This was not a moral point for me - we needed the business WAY too badly to be quibbling over convictions.

Hilariously, the Big Cheese of this group (not the company, just the group we were working for, but due to the nature of the business, a very famous man and many-times-published author) invited me to his Election Night Election Watch & Buffet. Yes, in 2000. When Bush ran.

I have never in my life felt more out of place. There's a room full of 95% upper-class post-40 white folks, one or two in their thirties, and ME. If you had painted me blue it wouldn't have made any difference. And I'm standing there for HOURS trying desperately to avoid talking politics AT AN ELECTION DINNER, I have one of the clients openly weeping at me when they announced Bush lost, the Big Cheese and I have mutually discovered that we haven't more than about six words total to exchange with one another, and all six involved the fact that we both happen to live in Brooklyn, some extremely rich white brat who actually HAD FOUR NAMES AND A "III" at the end of them is brattily attempting to extract political discussion from me, and the one member of the team who is moderately decent to talk to regardless of his wholly offensive beliefs is so drunk he's drooling on the Louis the XIV endtables.

God, that sucked. I left somewhere around Idaho, having stayed a respectable three hours. At least the food was okay.

hm, unlike you not to respond to comments :)

At any rate, proceeding with the Interrogation Method of Prompting Diary Entries -

Ok, so I was trying to think what to ask, which is somewhat tricky due to not having seen you in 10 years, which means that I don't have many specifics to ask about in that time, so I usually wind up remembering back to when we were around 14 or 15. Without documenting my entire train of thought, which, hi, would read like Proust over here, I started thinking about trying to ask you something about new Paul, couldn't come up with anything, and started thinking about earlier boyfriends, which then made me think about the Great Boyfriend Swap-n-Stew of the early 90s.

And I don't think I ever got your perspective. There was the whole Jeff business (whee!), which was an issue for you at the time, and then Alexis...and then JJ (and Alexis....), and god, who else? Weren't there others? Wasn't there an old guy who used to hang out with us? Oh, and Hunter! Weren't you and Hunter together for a while? Why can't I remember anything about JJ other than that he had pretty and soft hair? Also I can't really remember what Jeff looked like except for the ridiculous hair and screwy teeth (which I actually don't mean in the perjorative - Mike has WAY screwy teeth).

So! Thus your charge of Thursday, November 13 :)