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Treading that Fine Line
Truth and being on the right side can be rival siblings
The pendulum swings
Life has a habit of taking time to correct itself and sometimes we have to intervene and shock the system. There’s nothing like crashing or breaking something you value to shock you into changing course. Yet using shock to make changes on a regular basis can be destructive and counterproductive. There comes a point where you give up on, or lash out on, someone who repeatedly intervenes in your regular activities.
Conversely, life can take a turn whereby you find yourself in a permanent state of discomfort such as when trends change and you find yourself stranded in time. The pendulum has swung past its midpoint and you find yourself consistently on the wrong side of history or out of touch and it feels like its the world that’s wrong and not you. Your instinct is to stop the pendulum.
In social justice, where a wrong is corrected, the pendulum can appear to swing too far the other way — and sometimes it does. Yet if it was impeded in its swing, the pendulum would not be allowed to escape the inertia that holds it back. Progress doesn’t travel in a straight line, it meanders about a theoretical normal that is only ever glanced.
The analogy of rival siblings illustrates how we arrive in the right place (as often as…
