Old Age Gas

Blah, blah.  I just reread, for about the hundredth time, yesterday's blog "Same or Opposite."  I apologize for being such an insufferable gasbag.  My intention in writing that wordy discourse was to clarify my own thinking about the issue of same-sex marriage.  I realize, now, that I obfuscated more than clarified.  And I rambled on pontifically about things that I don't really understand and/or can't be sure about.  I really don't know, for example, whether there is a God who might grant or withhold "inalienable" rights to some or all human beings.  I don't know for sure that karma isn't built into the structure of the universe.  And I'm actually embarrassed by my confident application of Darwinian principles to societies as a whole (rather than to species).  I have always been terribly uneasy with social Darwinism, so what was I thinking?  In fact, I have no idea exactly HOW certain practices, once considered unacceptable, gradually acquire respectability and currency.  Maybe social norms CAN be established by executive or judicial decree (did Brown v. Board of Education change society, or did it merely legitimize a change that had already taken place in our collective consciousness--if not in our actual behavior?)

I hate not knowing.  For me, anyway, uncertainty is paralyzing.  I just dither, unsure of what direction to take, what plan to support, sur quel pied danser.  Help!  I'm becoming a fossile.

Anyway, I was tempted to remove "Same or Opposite," since it's so clearly (!) unclear.  But I finally decided to leave it hanging there--as a testimony to my struggle and as evidence that, in the end, a great deal of political commentary is just hot air.