FRIES OR NO FRIES? WAR OR NO WAR?

My heart is not one of my healthier assets. Hence my recent 50-pound weight loss on my way to 70. Every time my cardiologist suggests throwing a new pill or procedure at me, I faithfully tell him to go ahead. At that point, he puts on his best Dr. Freud accent and tells me, “It’s not so simple, Wilson. You present a complex situation.”

I make a beeline for simplistic, unequivocal answers. He prudently weighs and ponders alternatives. He thus is more protective of my life than I am.

Ah, for every one of life’s decisions to be simplistic. Onions on that burger? Yes or no. Supersize those fries? Yes or no. Diet Coke or regular? Yes or no. A tad of health consciousness may play a marginal role, but the switch is basically on-or-off.

What about life’s larger and more ultimate questions? Funny, but we used to call these types of questions “ponderous,” in the sense that they were heavy, bulky, and inferring that they demanded careful contemplation and meticulous weighing of consequences and alternatives. To ponder is the precise antithesis of snap judgments and unequivocal decisions.

Pondering is not a natural human inclination. It begets frustration, impatience, the demand to assess alternatives, to find the path to compromise, to accept the legitimacy of other positions, even to acknowledge ones errors.

Rigidity in ones positions, the refusal to engage in pondering, seem to be the inherent human condition, or at least the well-condition response of our generation. Perhaps we should attribute it to the pervasive fries-or-no-fries simplemindedness of what Mencken called our “booboise.” Perhaps at the other end of the spectrum, we should attribute it to conservative fundamentalism’s theological-cum-political demand of one-dimensional determinism: Saved or damned. Heaven or hell. Pro-life or murderer. Us or them. Friend or foe. Cocky, know-it-all liberals have smugly responded with their own brand of equal-but-opposite self-righteousness, creating their own obstinate fundamentalism as insidious as that of the right.

Pervasive stupidity, intransigence of theo-socio-politics or whatever, rigid absolutism has not merely stifled lively academic debate. It has threatened our basic ethical stability, boding more of a totalitarianism dictated by the last one standing than the equilibrium determined by well-pondered decision-making and compromise.

Terri Schiavo, dead or alive? Ponder or picket? The legacy of Bill Clinton, demonic or visionary? Or will time be its ultimate judge? So too for both the Bush’s. Selecting Supreme Court justices? Inalterable political battle-lines or thoughtful debate of relative merits? Life begins at conception? Life begins at birth? Acknowledge that both positions stem from venerated ethical tradition? Or bomb abortion clinics? Attacking Iraq good? Attacking Iraq bad? I have my strong inclinations, but am I sure?

Let no one mistake the virtue of pondering for moral ambiguity. We will come to decisions. Not everyone will like them. They will have their critics, even vitriolic ones. But they will be thoughtful and debated. They will not be determined by camera-mugging, shrill talking-heads, intimidation and the politics of intransigency.
What have we gained by the dictatorship of the loudest? What have we lost by muffling and discrediting the prudent, compassionate voices that speak respectfully to each other and coalesce to contemplate the ultimate issues of our destiny?

The professor who went on to be my mentor in bioethics gently but summarily dismissed my vaunted knowledge of medical ethics. “You know all the rights-and-wrongs and switches to flip,” he admonished me, “but you have yet to fully understand what we are to ponder when we ponder.”

Now his admonition comes back full circle, as I think of pacemakers, ablations, stents and meds with which Dr. Rubenstein nurtures my cranky heart. “It’s not so simple, Wilson. You present a complex situation.”

Knowing what to ponder when we ponder, or even pondering at all, before we send our young men and women off to war, or abort a fetus, or withdraw a feeding tube, or let a man with an IQ of 80 “fry” in an electric chair – all of it is “not so simple,” despite the picketers and cameras right outside the door.