Whose side are you on?

Did you like the State of the Union address last night? Your answer probably depends on whose side you think you’re on. No mistaking which side Paul Ryan is on — he couldn’t even let himself laugh when he wanted to.

“I wasn’t chortling. I was choking on my Republican-approved chewing gum. Obama has never amused me.”

Elsewhere in U.S. politics, is there any question which side Wayne Lapierre is on? The NRA is so convinced they have the only right answer, they don’t even want our government to study other possibilities.

When a divisive statement starts with “The only way to…” you can be reasonably sure you’re expected to choose a side.

How about religion? When influential leaders of influential churches double down on policies that make gay believers want to die, they’re being clear whose side they’re on, and they want you to be just as clear.

“The somber reality is that there are ‘servants of Satan’ embedded throughout society.” Now let’s choose sides.

Don’t stop there — pick any issue. Whose side are you on? Why do you think you have to choose? Why do we let other people define the possible answers?

No matter how badly our primitive brains want us to believe it, life is not lived in two dimensions. Fight is not the only alternative to flight. Abdication is not the only alternative to control. Agree is not the only alternative to disagree.

Dichotomies such as these depend too often on metaphors of math or color theory— metaphors that make us feel as if life can be as predictable as an equation or as obvious as splash of black ink against a bright sheet of paper.

“You’re either for us,” they demand, “or you are against us!”

I see the binary bundled in their declaration, and I get that binaries help us believe our lives are straightforward and predictable and safe. But I reject the binary.

I am not for them, and I am not against them. I am not one of them, and I am not one of their enemies. I reject the idea that I have to agree or disagree. I do not reject them, I reject their false dichotomy.

“Are you black?” I am not black.

“Are you white?” I am not white.

“I see! You are a shade of gray!” I am not a shade of gray.

So they make me a caricature of their two-dimensional rhetoric. I am labeled: Uninformed, naive, foolish, short-sighted, weak. Dangerous, even. Unwilling to take a stand against white, and just as unwilling to take a stand with black.

I can see the black, of course, and I can see the white, and I can see the variations in between. But we do not exist in a two-dimensional world. I reject black, I reject white, and I won’t settle for a shade of gray — compromise is not the way out of a false dichotomy.

We are more than two-dimensional. We are more than right or wrong, true or false, agree or disagree. We are more than a shade of gray between two extremes. Let’s tease apart the dichotomies they present, and reject each one in turn. Stop choosing sides, feeding the fight they want us to feed. Find instead the word “or” in every debate and wonder how to turn it into “and.” Change the conversation. Change the possible answers, then change the questions. Reach beyond the black and white extremes they tell us to choose from and discover instead the infinite possibilities of color. Let’s mix our own pallets and go make a beautiful, colorful mess in three dimensions.

Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in a response and I’ll... Oh come on, you didn’t read it at all, did you? Don’t agree with me — get out there and change the nature of the conversations that matter most to you!