The Daunting Assortment of Grays

Sometimes I wish I could just wrap myself in an American flag, or an anarchist flag, or my $75 replica of the Shroud of Turin from the Bible gift shop. I want to crawl into a womb of simple answers and black-and-white ideology. I want to see the world free of grays and halftones like everyone else seems to.

Our country needs stability in the oil supply. / No blood for oil.

I want to stand up at a political convention and shout my approval of someone who I so wholeheartedly believe in that I see his or her opponent as less than human. I want to believe that "they" are destroying society, or that "we" have the answers to save it.

Bomb them all. / Food not bombs.

How noble and important I would feel if I could just believe that something as absurd as "the best country on Earth" actually exists, and that I live in it. How easy it would be to think instead that my country was entirely void of nobility, justice, or equality, and to devote my life to destroying it.

Love it or leave it. / Tear the whole fucking thing down.

In any job I've ever had, or any work I've ever done, the hardest task is to take something broken and try to fix it. It's much easier to leave it alone and convince everyone else that it's fine, or to scrap it and build a new one from scratch. Analyzing flaws and coming up with a plan to fix them, while preserving everything that works is hard.

It would be even easier not to give a fuck, sit back on the couch, watch some reality TV, have myself a Big Mac and a beer and leave the thinking to some other jerk.

Ultimately, the easiest thing to do would be to believe that none of this matters, that there is some kind of god living somewhere in the sky who will take me upstairs to his funhouse when I die. I could put up with a complex word of shades of gray, content in the knowledge that one day I won't have to deal with them. Hell, I wouldn't have to deal even with black and white, just an eternity of white. That is, if I was born into the right religion, which suggests the futility of that whole religion thing, but there I go thinking again...