My father saw the world in terms of absolutes: liberal or conservative, gay or straight, east or west, right or wrong, black or white. There were no grays in my father’s world. A rule was a rule—all the time—without question--case closed (his favorite phrase).
When I got to college, and studied higher math I learned things like: everything to the zero power is 1 but zero to the zero power is undefined; and that parallel lines meet in infinity. I also remember graphing differential equations or derivatives or something long forgotten like that where on the graph, for a particular set of coordinates, one would place a circle—it was called a hole—and it meant none of the math rules for those coordinates applied. If parallel lines could meet, and graphs could have holes, then the premise that the world is absolute couldn’t possibly be true. There must be an exception to every rule. There must be gray in every black.
So I got to really thinking about it. Is there really an exception to every rule? Could I find a gray in every black? The first thought popped in my head was this: Do not let babies play with plastic bags. Absolutely—that’s a good rule. It even says it prominently on the side of the dry cleaning bag. No one wants the baby to suffocate. But what if the plastic bag was really really really small? So very tiny that the bag could be ingested by the baby and then pooped out later—then it would be okay for the baby to play with a plastic bag—the bag would no longer be a danger. Or how about this one: Only cross the street when the sign says walk. My mother did that and that’s how she got hit by a car in the crosswalk on Franklin Avenue—and she even looked both ways before she crossed. Or how about an even more serious one: Never take heroin. Surely that has to be an absolute rule—unless you are at the very very end stages of cancer and you are close to death and in terrible pain and the morphine isn’t working and you are not too afraid to go to Hempstead to get it—then heroin would be okay--illegal, but ethically okay.
I don’t think rules were made to be broken necessarily but certainly very many, if not all rules have an exception. And sometimes the exception is easy to discern---like that it’s okay to wear white jeans past Labor day if you are vacationing in Australia where it is summertime. Sometimes the exception is more difficult to arrive at though; like for example: if it is Friday during Lent and you accidentally pop a mini hotdog in your mouth at a cocktail party should you spit it out to adhere to the no meat rule, or should you swallow it to conform to the don’t waste food rule. Which rule has the more ethical exception? No meat or no waste?
Technically black and white are not colors. Black is the absorption of all the colors of the spectrum and white is the reflection of all the colors of the spectrum. An absolute is in fact not absolute (unless we are talking about Vodka). A case maybe closed, but as long as it is not locked, the wind could blow it wide open. My Aunt Jackie taught me that sometimes 2 + 2 = 5. And while her intended meaning was not literal (she meant that it was okay to let people be wrong about things sometimes if it avoided meaningless conflict), she happens to be mathematically correct. 2 + 2 only equals 4 in a base 10 math system. In a different base system the equation could in theory equal 5. Exceptions are the rule.
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