Coffee Fueled Feelings on Having Options

There is a YouTube video making the rounds on Facebook again. If you haven't seen it before it's right here. It's ok I will wait:

Mr. Zach Wahls makes a very moving point.  Legalizing discrimination is not something we should tolerate.  But mostly he makes me think about how I see life these days.  Life is complicated.  Our societies only make it more so.  As members of a group living together we always have a struggle for balance between personal freedoms and societal coherence.  I always believed that personal freedoms are important, but that it was more important to protect ourselves from each other when in doubt.  A derogatory term for this view is the 'nanny state.'  Wear your seat belt and so on.  There are obvious downsides, and dangers to moving to that side of the balance.  An authoritarian regime is one extreme of this. 

The flip side is unbridled personal liberties.  You want it, you can do it.  Assuming that you can pay for it and keep it from everyone else.  Lawless survival of the fittest.  There is something almost romantic about having a solid 6 shooter, a rifle, and a horse and carving out a piece of the world for your very own in the wild west.  But quickly the few will completely own the many.  The stronger man becomes the better man, and gains all the spoils because of it.  Anarchy breaking down into brutality.

Binary views fail.  All of one, and none of the other is not an answer.  How do you describe the staggering beauty of a sunset in black and white?  Don't we loose all of the beauty of those amazing colors playing on the clouds, on the sea as the stars slowly become visible in the sky?  More basic.  How can you describe the color blue in terms of black and white?  It is a too narrow view to fit life into.

We need options.  Life is so diverse, with each interaction unique in it's own way.  Mitigating circumstances that make it different from the others.  Being in a fixed state of mind guarantees there will be situations don't fit.  Options.  We need them available to us.  Having options does not negate the need for responsibilities.  Every moral agent is responsible for their choices, but that is another rant.  We are responsible for our own choice and actions.  We are not responsible for telling people what they cannot do in their own homes. 

The classic phrase for this balance is 'my freedom to swing my fists stops right at your nose.'  We have to able to accept our personal views, and even our personal needs may not be shared by those around us.  We have to learn how to be ok with actually living by the golden rule.  If we are as a society trying to improve ourselves, then we must learn from the march of progress that is our history.  If we really want to, we can find balance that will make us stronger, not weaker.  A balance that makes us fuller, richer human beings, not shallow fearful homo-sapiens. 

/end rant