The Binary Paradox

Nothing is Black and White...Until it is

In America, we have the luxury of fluidity in a way that exists in no other society on earth at the moment. No other country has the disposable income, time, and space to partake in these debates, and we are privileged to be where we are, given the state of the rest of the world. Nothing is clear, everything is now seen through a milky haze, like the vaseline on the camera's lens back in the old days before filters made us all look mishapen and doe-eyed. The things we once trusted as constant: identity, gender, political party lines, “trusted news sources”, even history and basic facts (the world is round) are now called into question, and not by the three lone gunmen locked in a basement apartment on computers infiltrating the CIA. It’s not fringe or crackpots that are casting aspersions on whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Now it’s your next-door neighbor who thinks the Clintons operate a pedophilic pizza parlor in central D.C., and it’s your kid’s teacher who tells the class the names of countries have been changed, from Israel to OPT, despite that pesky fact that no such change has been made in a legal, geopolitical or global sense. This is the mainstream, baby, and we are all through the looking glass where nothing is as we thought it seemed. Up is down, black is white, and we now have to look at the nametag to make sure we are using the correct pronoun, lest the human being, dressed in a skirt, full make-up with long hair and earrings dress us down publicly when his back is turned to let us know he is a he.

I don’t take umbrage with a lot of this evolution. I have no issue with pronouns, though I often get whiplash since a few of my kids’ friends have changed their pronouns more frequently than they shower. I’ve always been a social justice warrior and have marched, organized, funded, and personally supported everything from the Soviet Jewry Movement, to Gay Rights to BLM before they lost their minds and decided “Zionists” (read Jews) are the anti-Christ. Well, I suppose in the most basic sense, they are the anti-Christ, but not in a burn down the world, horseman, lake of fire way. I have often shared that the most interesting things happen in the grey zone. Black and white is so pedestrian and predictable. Nothing of extiment exists there, it’s only what the status quo, systemic models of how people “should” and “shouldn’t” behave based on arbitrary standards mostly engendered by a group of people who thought England in the seventeenth century was too liberal (cue horror face). So if we want to play with normatives and experiment with fluidity, I say, bless it. Take what you like, leave the rest, respect people’s choices even if you hate them, and we’re good.

Unfortunately, that’s not the reality.

The reality is that everything is fluid until one of our two political parties decides they aren’t. Then suddenly, the world is broken down into sides: You’re either with “us” or against us, and if you fall on what either perceives as the against side, you are the destroyer of all things good and decent and must be silenced at best, or eliminated at worst. I’m less interested in pointing out specifics of this stupid new world order than I am in pointing out the hypocrisy of it in general and how it is eroding the brains of what used to be intelligent people and turning them into tapioca pudding served at the rest home. I have a good friend with whom I talk about these things all the time because we are centrists in a sea of liberals who are perfect examples of this binary paradox. Everything is fluid until they decide it isn’t, and then you’re wrong. He thinks that hypocrisy isn’t a sin, but isn’t it?

If lust is a deadly sin, and I’ve never met a person who hasn’t, surely we can fit hypocrisy into the mix. It is just as deadly as wrath, greed, or sloth, except it kills others in real time, not just the sinner. It invades the mind and body, creeping in and creating a justification for anything an individual believes is “right”. But the worst of this rigidity is the self-righteousness and faux moral authority that always follows. As though morality is now the foundation of anything, any country or group bases its decisions or policies on. Nowhere is that more evident than in the loudest and most vocal country leading the charge in this arena, the United States of America. Suddenly, the country that has stolen the most land, committed genocide against the most indigenous people in the Western Northern hemisphere, and even now, enacts laws prohibiting one of the largest ethnic minorities from voting is the moral compass, leading the charges of social justice? Um, pardon me while I laugh hysterically to the point of falling on the floor. Of course, we should protest that which is wrong in the world, and point out unjust policies worldwide…we just don’t vote for those things, have leadership with the moral authority to carry them out, or do anything meaningful to change. We have, however, gotten really good at catchy slogans, cultural appropriation as protest (because only then is cultural appropriation okay, otherwise, if you go to the movies with a certain hairstyle, be prepared to be harassed by a stranger) and freezing out people who don’t say what they want us to say or believe how they want us to believe.

When last I checked, and I had to go back into the history books for this one, feminism was about choice. I can stay home or go to work. I can have children or not, get married or not, and love whom I wish to love. That has evolved to a movement I don’t recognize and can no longer support. And that’s just one example of a group I used to be an integral part of and a supporter of. There are so many others, and it makes me sad that these movements that I so believed in have evolved into something that I can only describe as icky. It’s a juvenile word, but in this instance, it’s the only word that sums up how this ideology makes me feel emotionally, physically, and mentally. It’s not going to change because the powers that be, and I’m talking about both the left and the right, galvanized political parties in this country, and the people who seem devoted to toeing their party lines rather than following logic and baseline decency. Because this is our current reality, I feel like voices like mine, those of us who used to be called liberal social democrats, the once the center of this nation, are now marginalized to the point where nothing we do or say matters and our input is disregarded. I can’t and won’t stop living in the grey because the rest is merely a cacophony of noise, misinformation, and warped ideals that are not realistic but, at their core, have left decency behind. If we want to live fluidly, then we should apply that flow evenly to all things and people.

I plan to do just that…so long as you buy my book. If you don’t, you’re cancelled and I can no longer “engage”. Just kidding, but here’s the link anyway to pre-order My Year of Really Bad Dates, A Memoir if you haven’t already. But you have, right?

First author panel/event at the Gold Coast Book Fair. It was fabulous.