The problem with political correctness - even if I subscribe to some of its core beliefs, especially making sure that opportunity is truly equal for minorities - is that PC's most-rigid followers misread the world with their blinkered view, just as surely as those folks who follow an allegedly conservative bent in their natures to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
One of the major problems with following any ideology is that you often can't see the variety in the forest for the darkness of the trees in the aggregate.
I was telling a friend the other day about a conversation I had a couple of years ago at a Seattle party. Another partygoer, a young woman, grew more and more exasperated with me during the course of our initially convivial chit-chat.
We had been talking about abortion and had agreed that we were both pro-choice. Somehow the death penalty came up soon after, and I said that after working closely with convicts for two years in the state of Washington, I'd become a limited advocate of the death penalty in some, not all, cases.
The look on her face said plainly that I'd transgressed.
After a brief argument, based on her feelings, not on facts or her personal experience, she stamped her foot and said, "You can't be pro-choice and pro-death penalty!"
Our conversation ended shortly thereafter, and as I recounted the failed chat the other day, my mind flashed back to when I was laboring as the county bureau chief for a chain of twice-weekly newspapers in the mid- to late '90s.
I'd befriended a few cops and prosecutors, in the midst of covering countywide crime.
At a neighborhood tavern one afternoon, I spoke with a young lady who worked for the county's law-enforcement team.
She'd asked me what I thought about a recent trial she'd seen me covering, after which a criminal had sworn to appeal his death-row sentence. (He'd been convicted of brutally killing a teenage girl he didn't know.)
I think she expected a liberal response, since that was my reputation over there.
I told her that if the evidence was solid and he had really done those things he was accused of, which included more than brutally snuffing out a promising, young life, I had no trouble with the state planning his early demise.
She sniffed at my qualifying statements about the validity of the evidence, but I could tell she was surprised. As is often the case in these benchmark discussions, the conversation soon turned to abortion.
She was against it in all cases. I was for it, in most cases - but not all.
I added that my solution to the county's unemployment woes would be to hire hundreds of the unemployed to sit on abortion and death-penalty commissions, handling each case separately.
Just as there are many criminals who should not be executed (each crime is different), there are some abortions that shouldn't be approved.
She seemed appalled and later told other people that "he had to be kidding."
My inconsistencies struck the politically correct woman as demented, while the same semi-broad views on a mere two subjects convinced her that I was an unserious, and hence untrustworthy, person.
American life - of which we are a part, like it or not - is riddled with problems caused by a seemingly inbred desire for simplistic solutions.
Trust in Jesus.
Trust in the state.
Trust in President Bush.
Trust in Gov. Li'l Chrissie.
All of these divergent views share one troubling characteristic: None of them truly admits an opposing viewpoint within its narrow, hidebound parameters.
Scott Fitzgerald once said that a primary sign of the adult mind was its ability to hold two opposing viewpoints at once.
This is not something we as a culture understand, much less advocate.
I can tell you plainly that many people not only refuse to see the gray in issues, they will not admit that maybe this writer can see them either.
I think it is why many of my right-leaning critics always capitalize the word "liberal" in their screeds.
But it isn't just them.
I've been accused of being a shill for the "evil ones on the right" almost as often.
My heart, it is true, leans left of center, but my brain, fading and battered as it is, flutters mostly right above the net, where the view in either direction is often quite frightening to my gentle soul.
I still believe, though, despite naysayers, that (for example) you can hate the war in Iraq and yet support the troops stuck fighting there, and also totally sympathize with the poor, damaged Iraqi population on the ground, being decimated from both sides now.
These are hard things to do sometimes, but they are not impossible.
There are always two sides to every story, and usually the third and fourth side (not having the money or the pulpit) haven't even been heard from yet.
Everything except death is a gray area.
Freelance columnist Dennis Wilken can be reached via e-mail at needitor@ nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
