Imagine the best cake you’ve ever had, or could ever hope to have. I am talking about a really nice, moist, chocolate cake. How could you describe this cake? I don’t mean words that express opinion, like “delicious”, I mean, words that express fact. Could we say “brown”, for instance. That would be factually correct. We could say sweet, I am sure everyone would agree to that. Could we say “salty”? Could we say “bitter”? If this is the best cake you’ve ever had, you would likely not use those words. But the fact is, this cake has salt in it, which is salty. It has baking powder in it, too, and that is quite bitter. Why don’t we use “salty” and “bitter” to describe the cake?
I am quite confident that if I made a cake and left out these undesirable ingredients, like salt and baking powder, you would certainly miss them. Your brain would say “the bad ingredients are gone”, but your mouth would probably want to spit out this cake. If “sweet” is our goal in making a great cake, why not double or triple the sugar that goes in? Wouldn’t that be sweeter than our best-ever, only “sweet” cake? Logically, creating the best cake would mean cranking up the positive qualities and eliminating the negative ones. So why does this super sweet cake taste so bad?
The truth in nearly ever situation is closer to the middle of the road than to the extremes. Everywhere we look today, we see extreme behaviour, extreme dress, extreme music, extreme entertainment, extreme media, extreme ideas and beliefs. Adopting a stance at either end of a spectrum almost certainly always leads away from reality, whatever that might be.
One of my least favorite examples of extremeness is in the media. Today, we have very few men and women of dignity and class to deliver facts to us, instead, we have “pundits”. And what exactly is a pundit? It’s a term from many years ago that means one who has membership in a scholarly field. But you would not understand that by watching TV or clips on YouTube. Today, the word pundit means one who talks louder than everyone else and has views that are extreme. Of course, these brash men and women on TV who talk over one another to pound an extreme point of view are entertaining, and that is because they belong to a realm of fantasy, not fact. No matter what your political viewpoint is, we love watching pundits, because they are easy to classify as heros and villains. Is Keith Olbermann arriving on his white horse to untie the girl helplessly tied to the train tracks by Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly? Or maybe it’s your point of view that Ann Coulter is the voice of reason, while Jon Stewart preaches to the stoners.
Whoever you cheer for, you are cheering for nothing more than a news channel version of the WWF.
Each one of these pundits has an agenda, and that agenda is not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal. It is an agenda of extremes. That is the real battle. Glenn Beck compared Obama to Hitler during the 2008 election, that’s quite extreme, isn’t it? Keith Olbermann almost nightly called for the the arrest of Bush, using his well-worn thesaurus. It seemed extreme.
You think, “no one actually gets the news from these people”. You could be right, but based on what I have seen, this is less and less the case. I don’t see too many Peter Mansbridge Facebook fan pages, but I’ve seen plenty of Internet love/hate for the pundits. ( Can you imagine Peter Mansbridge yelling at a guest or mocking them opening? Neither can I. )
Extremeness doesn’t end there, I only wish it did. Every single aspect of life has been touched by the absolute adoption of extreme points of view. From extreme views on religion to extreme views on healthcare, extreme views on parenting to extreme views on political issues, we all seem to be a slave to the pendulum that swings from “truth” to “truth”, and that pendulum can’t seem to fly fast enough through equilibrium.
Religion is a fun battleground, where we can find extremes of every kind. Atheists want to put their stock into the “big bang theory” and quantum physics that is so abstract, it doesn’t resemble anything we are familiar with in the physical world at all, while looking down their noses at anyone who believes in “flying spaghetti monsters”. On the other side, we have extreme Christian groups who protest the funerals of soldiers, stating that the United States is being punished for the sins of the nation, turning solemn and private family mourning into a stage for extreme beliefs. Is it our of the realm of possibility that the truth of religious matters most likely lies somewhere between the extremes?
Being a parent of soon to be two kids, I am constantly given parenting advice, and 99% of it is unsolicited. I have found the people who want to constantly give you advice are no different than news channel pundits. They are the loudest and have the most extreme opinions that fly to both ends of the spectrum. I’ve had people tell me how to do everything: eating, sleeping, playing, learning, dressing and so on. Couldn’t the truth of the situation be that every parent and child is different, and that the unique responsibility of parenting that unique child is the sole responsibility of the parent? No matter the intentions of friends, family, nurses and the general population, if you give me advice that seems extreme, you can be sure I will not heed it.
Everyone needs to ultimately decide for themselves how they will live life, but next time you find yourself looking through a rack of clothes that look like they belong to Lady Gaga’s backup dancers, think of that cake made only with sugar.
