"There is no black and white; the world is in color!"
-Jorge González
There is no such thing as a simple human being. There is no straightforward argument, there is no single-mindedness, no fixed motive. Human nature, in its arrogance, seeks out bold-face lines separating good and bad, right and wrong. The line isn't so defined, though, and comes in various shades and tones.
I'm not trying to sound like a relativist; the existence of tones does not eliminate the distinction between colors. But just imagine the infinite factors that contribute to a single perspective on a single issue at a single point in time.
Human nature shies from uncertainty. It reveres it as deity or destiny or science. The unknown holds a certain authority over us. Some spurn such authority, others tremble in abject fear of it, but in either case it drives us. Even so, ambiguity is the great taboo of the Western world; what nobody tells you is that it's both unavoidable and embraceable.
It's fascinating in a geeky kind of way how language impacts our acceptance of the unknown. In English, there's only one verb for "to be;" in Spanish, there are two. Spanish separates the permanent from the finite, the description from the state of being. "Ser" is the definite, "estar" the temporal. In recounting the story of some guy hitching it out to live off the wilderness, a professor of mine, Iñaki, noted that "only an American could think that he is actually from and a part of nature (ser). A Spanish-speaker understands that we are only in it (estar)." The man died. The English language in itself gets us cocky enough to consolidate ourselves into the essence of the universe; Spanish recognizes the gray areas.
I'm not trying to sound like I think Latinos have everything right; it's just an example of how uncertainty is a part of the human condition whether or not we choose to recognize it.
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