Whatever happened to that concept? As a kid, even as a teenager, whenever I would get caught doing doing something wrong, the very first two questions out of my parents’ mouths were the most excruciating to answer, because we obviously knew the answer, “Was it wrong?” and “Did you know it was wrong?” As we had to struggled to blurt the inevitable, “yes”, we were already in tears because we knew the fatal blow was about to be delivered by a soul crushing string of six words, “So you chose to do wrong?”
As a tenured adult, I have to acknowledge that many of our problems aren’t so black and white. There are many grey areas that exist that we debate throughout our lifetimes and some, I suppose that we will be debating up until our time on this planet expires. However, what has me concerned about this post-factual, polarized society that we occupy is that the simplistic of the simplistic of issues are being classified as grey and as a casualty, we are losing the traits I admire most in people including empathy, dignity and overall human-decency. I often ponder, on the surface of many of the issues that plague our society, “what happened to ‘wrong is fucking wrong’?”
I am not a civil rights expert, nor would I ever proclaim to be. I’m just a technology guy. But what I do know is that we as a society are better than what we are displaying and do not know the answers to many of these issues. Though, I think a good starting point would be acknowledging that wrong is fucking wrong.