A few weeks back, I used this space to air some opinions regarding the state of public health in Birmingham and Alabama. Among those ruminations were some pretty strong comments about the governor of our fair state, Robert Bentley, and his refusal to expand Alabama’s Medicaid system — which he could do with a penstroke that would provide access to healthcare for more than 300,000 Alabamians who are uninsured at present.
To say the least, I was not gentle in my assessment of Gov. Bentley’s stance on Medicaid expansion and the horrible price Alabama is paying, and will continue to pay, for it. Without recapitulating my comments in their entirety, I will stipulate that I characterized our governor as a horrible person. I called him a violator of the Hippocratic Oath he took when he became a dermatologist, an officeholder who gives his politics a higher priority than the crying needs of the poor state he serves, and a poor practitioner of the Christianity in which he professes faith (on this last note, I am compelled to acknowledge here my own numerous and frequent shortcomings as a believer, though I’d sure like to think that if I knew that any of them were going to result in the deaths of 500 or so — or, for that matter, even one — of my fellow Alabamians per annum, I would reconsider my actions).
A couple of days after that column appeared, I was having an afternoon cup of coffee with a longtime leader in our community, a person for whom I have the utmost respect and admiration — and whose political views, insofar as I am familiar with them, generally are congruent with mine. In the course of a very pleasant and productive conversation, this person offered an opinion about what I had written.
“Your remarks about Bentley were over the top,” she opined. Now, while I took some issue with that, I also took the criticism very seriously — as I do any criticism that is offered in earnest. As I’ve indicated, I am a man of many flaws, but an aversion to honest disagreement is not among them.
Indeed, such disagreement is essential. It is essential to me personally — the way in which I live my life and wear the hats of journalist, columnist, publisher and citizen — and it is essential to the life of our community, our state, our nation and our world. I am thankful every day for the opportunities I have been afforded throughout my professional life to express my thoughts and opinions, and am always appreciative when someone takes the time to share their own in response to something I have said or written.
That is true regardless of whether or not their views — generally, or on a specific issue or topic — happen to coincide with mine. In this vein, I find it amusing, if a little vexing as well, when people speak of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States as a monolith of concurrence in the ways and means by which our ongoing experiment in democracy is supposed to work. We are a nation founded in, and on, disagreement, and if there is a true measure of the peril in which our republic stands at present, it is the very great extent to which we seem to have lost the ability — or perhaps it’s the willingness — to disagree without one side, the other, or both (to borrow from Robert Frost’s famous definition of education) losing their temper or their self-confidence.
Here, I will make yet another admission, one that will come as no surprise to anyone, friend or foe, who has known me for any length of time: I think I’m right about most things, most of the time. This is the product of both nature and nurture, a proclivity to say what I think, an ability to back it up with whatever knowledge I have accumulated during my time on this earth, and a willingness to defend it in the face of any and all opposition.
By the same token, I do not exist nor speak nor write in a vacuum, and I surely do not think I have cornered the market on either knowledge or certainty. There are times when I am as wrong as wrong can be, about matters great and small. What’s more, I am in general perfectly willing — if not always eager, and rarely without a fight — to be proved wrong, especially as it relates to matters of fact, as opposed to opinion.
Why am I telling you all of this? Frankly, I’m not quite sure. This is not the column I set out to write — it was supposed to be about the idea of objectivity in journalism — and if you find the subject of Mark Kelly as pedestrian as I, then you might have abandoned this one long before reaching this point (if not, I thank you from the bottom of my heart). And yet, here we are, the end result, I suppose, of letting a subject have its head and not being wed to any particular outcome. Either that, or the inevitable product of not knowing quite what I wanted to write when I sat down to compose this.
Or perhaps it is about objectivity after all. Like one of my journalistic heroes, Hunter S. Thompson, I have long argued that such a thing does not exist. We all have opinions, beliefs, biases, proclivities, prejudices, and the idea that those things are not reflected in everything we say or do or write, in the choices we make, in the ways we approach our jobs, raise our children and exist in society, is not only ridiculous, but dangerous. I can imagine no worse hell than living in a world where everyone thinks, believes and acts exactly the way I do — or that you, Robert Bentley, Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama or anyone else does.
Are there things that are Absolutely Right and Absolutely Wrong? Of course there are. But in my view, all such things have to do with the way we treat one another. Everything else — the vast majority of our individual and collective lives — comes in shades of gray. We are moral and ethical free agents, blessed with the opportunity to make what we can and what we will of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The great challenge of humanity is to reason together, to be unthreatened by our differences and disagreements, to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we’re all in this together, and to act accordingly.
Do you disagree? Good. Let’s talk about it.
