As a child, I remember my elementary school teachers condemning my search for balance in “social studies,” where I sought to understand the rationale behind different people’s views on topics of the day. I was taught, with great anger by my teachers that I had to take only one position, one side. I could not understand both sides of the argument and seek to find a solution that respected everyone. That was simply not acceptable to my public school teachers in the 1960s and 1970s; I had to take an inflexible stand on only one position. In “social studies,” I consistently had this challenge with my public school teachers.

In the 1970s, I remember being the only one in the classroom with a specific position on then President Richard Nixon, who was under attack due to the Watergate scandal. I was going to summer school to take extra classes during the summer so that I could take more classes during the regular school year. The “social studies” teacher was convinced in Nixon’s guilt, and while I personally and politically objected to Nixon, I wanted to find out the results of the investigation first. This made me a pariah to both those who hated Nixon and those defended Nixon. They shouted at me: How dare I wait for the investigation? How dare I not take a stand on Nixon?

For impressionable children, decades of being pressured by their teachers and pressured to reject FAIRNESS and BALANCE no doubt impacted some of my classmates. Perhaps if my teachers had been more subtle and less heavy-handed in their tactics to force me to reject fairness and balance, I too would have succumbed more in that area. But their tactics had the reverse impact, their forcing me to stop asking questions and understanding the view of others forced my mind to stay open, not closed.

But for how many of the Baby Boomer Generation in America was the very idea of “the middle ground” lost forever?

The effort to destroy the view of “the middle ground” remains a fixation in the minds of many.

We are told that:
— You are either right or wrong.
— You are either with us or against us.
— You are either part of the solution, or you are part of the problem.
— It is either my way or the highway.
— You are either Democratic or Republican, left or right, liberal or conservative.

This binary totalitarianism remains a choke point to our society in America and the world today — seeking a simplistic answer to every problem — that often does not exist.

In a nation and a world where education and understanding is essential to the long-term survival of the human race, we are taught that the greatest danger is “paralysis of analysis.” How dare we get caught up in THINKING, so much that we don’t act precipitously?

This rigidity of thinking seeks to silence discussion, end debate, and constrain the search for solutions – by offering only

In a culture of do, do, do, we need to stop sometimes and think, think, think.

America is an impatient nation, and sometimes we need to be impatient. But our young nation has to have learned by now that we can’t solve every issue through impatience and force disguised as “resolve and determination.”

There are many issues and problems that need human attention. Some can be solved quickly, some won’t be solved in the near term, and some simply need to be discussed so that human thinking on the issue can evolve.

But we won’t do that if we continue to teach generation after generation, decade after decade, that there is never any room for a middle ground in human understanding in our differences.

We are not binary calculators or computers. We are human beings. Let us defy a tyranny of the loudest and most impatient voices that seek to define our choices for us.

Let us instead try to use our human brains we have been blessed with to think of all of the solutions we can find to our problems and to preserving our universal human rights and dignity for all.

Most importantly, as fellow human beings in understanding human problems, let us treat one another with the respect and compassion that we would seek for ourselves.