Tag: compromise

Modesitt on the Cruelty of Absolute Certainty

Quotable excerpt from middle of Modesitt’s blog posting:

The consequences of such absolutist beliefs have always been deadly, and usually terrifying, and that hasn’t changed, either. That was a lesson the Founding Fathers understood, and understood well. Because they didn’t want an absolutist government, they did their best to come up with a system that required a certain amount of compromise to work.

Well… now no one wants to compromise, and guess what… the system doesn’t work. What about that, exactly, is so hard to understand?

But I will have to part ways with some of his thinking, at least as he sums it up in the last paragraph.  I do agree that driving at high speeds, while drinking, texting, sleepy, distracted, etc. is a very bad thing, and in most of the United States is illegal, I can’t agree with his stance on guns.  A gun is a tool and won’t fire itself.  Any harm done by a gun (or any other weapon or bomb or poison or … you get the picture) falls clearly on the person wielding said weapon.

http://www.lemodesittjr.com/2014/11/25/the-cruelty-of-absolute-certainty-the-arrogance-of-the-true-believer/

Posted from WordPress for Android via my Samsung smartphone. Please excuse any misspellings. Ciao, Jon

Polarization v. Compromise or the Cold War v. Common Sense

The polls closed a few minutes ago here in the Heart of America (aka Kansas).  Twelve hours ago I took a few minutes to cast my votes and submit my ballot.  Something unheard of or scoffed at a thousand years ago, or even just a couple or three hundred years in the past; a privilege I have invoked every election year since 1982.  A non-violent non-fatal process for expressing and affirming a society’s will or vision and any changes thereto.

I stumbled across, via my WordPress subscriptions, a blog post by an author I admire, L.E. Modesitt, Jr. entitled ‘Election Day … and the Polarization of Everything?‘  His observations struck a chord with me, especially with the heightened awareness the Internet brings to the radical (left or right … take your pick) and the Tea Party movement.  Extreme viewpoints and adherence to a very strict code of ethics is laudable, but can lead to stalemates at best and a fall into violence at worst.

Without some hope of compromise, I envision a return to a Cold War-type era, where an ‘arms race’ of values and platforms trumps any Common Sense measures which when properly discussed and debated might actually benefit a majority of people.

I admit I’m often a centrist, attempting to accurately see both sides or all sides of an issue before making a suggestion or a decision.  No matter how uncomfortable it might make me feel, I want to ‘walk a mile’ in someone else’s shoes before putting on my own and breaking trail on my own path.