Seeing black and white
By JARED PUTNAM Union Sentinel Editor

INSTIGATING LOGIC

Afew weeks ago I had never even heard of Don Imus. Looking back on what has transpired since then, I get the feeling I wasn't missing out on much.

His remarks about the Rutgers Women's basketball team were racist, sexist, and nothing short of a guaranteed pink slip for him. He crossed a line and deserved what he got.

But the overall issue here is bigger than Imus. That's ok, because my editorial isn't about what he said. He has a history of saying stupid things. He needs a handler. Or at the very least, a decent barber.

I also accept the argument that there are tons of rap songs that are as bad or worse than what he said. But this isn't about that either.

Amdist the height of the controversy, NBC News aired a short segment in which they gathered a random group of people together in a room and recorded their discussions of the issue. The arguments literally reached the point where people were screaming at one another. Over Don Imus.

I guess that is really what interests me the most about this situation, taking a step back and examining how people react to controversial topics like this. At some point people seem to have lost the ability to agree to disagree, to stay calm and keep the personal element out of debates. The controversy over Imus is only one of many.

Think about all the other topics, national or local that can send people over the edge when discussing them. War supporters vs. detractors, Democrats vs. Republicans, move-ins vs. natives, those who want alcohol vs. those who don't, prolife vs. pro-choice, those who want to keep the rebel flag vs. those who don't, and on and on to infinity. Some of those issues are more serious than others, but the question remains, at what point did our society start making every single issue so personal, and taking every single issue so personally?

I would be hesitant to touch more than half of that stuff (in an editorial) with a 10-foot-pole. The expression "more trouble than its worth" comes to mind. Feedback is terrific and always appreciated, but I don't think I would have the time to field the amount of angry phone calls or read the amount of angry letters that taking a position on either side of those topics would generate.

People seem to have their minds made up 110 percent about so many topics, and there does not appear to be a lot of shades of grey in many people's eyes. In some ways I think that may be a response to the growing post-modern attitude that there are no absolutes, that truth is relative, and that nothing is black and white.

I certainly don't buy into that line of thinking, but in combating it, I think we have gone too far the other way. These days, I honestly think you could get a dozen random people in a room and ask them which is better, mustard or ketchup, and within fifteen minutes they would all be ready to kill each another.

I don't have the decades of perspective that some people have, so I don't really know if it has been this way for any length of time or if this is something that has worsened in recent years.

But from what I have seen, it does seem like things have gone downhill in the past decade or so. Few people appear content to choose their battles carefully or walk away from a dispute. Remember the old "talk to the hand" comeback? At some point I think it turned into "talk to the hand...as it tries to claw your eyes out." People on both sides of almost every issue imaginable seem to have adopted an unspoken rule that anyone who doesn't agree with them is bad, wrong, and needs to go far, far away.

The shooting at Virginia Tech is a reminder that these days it seems to take some tragic event, a 9/11 type of event, to bring people together for any length of time. Even then, it never lasts long. Abraham Lincoln said that "A nation divided cannot stand." If that's true, I have to believe that America's legs are getting a little wobbly at this point.