Fade to Gray

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Leonard Pitts has thought provoking column today, in which he reflects on his indifference to the recent execution of the DC sniper, juxtaposed with his extreme opposition to the death penalty, yet support of the right of women to have abortions. While he reaches no firm conclusions, he meanders his way to the following conclusion, which I quite like:

From our trenches of fixed opinion, we thunder at one another so readily that it is disconcerting when you are forced to wander the gray places between, to acknowledge complexities our certainties don’t always allow us to see. It can give you pause.

I submit that’s not the worst thing in the world.

I disagree with the sentiment that "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds," as Emerson is often misquoted, but the original wording is pretty close to my position. Consistency should be something to which we aspire. Yet as with my half-joking goal (how Freudian is it that I just misspelled that as "gaol") in life, to understand everything, the fact that we are finite and imperfect means that it will always and only be an aspiration. I submit that's not the worst thing in the world.