Spectrum v Binary 

My father, a Civil Rights activist, resigned as a Southern Baptist minister in 1969, as it became clear that the Board of Deacons would no longer tolerate his Civil Rights stances. After giving the eulogy at Dr. King’s memorial at the black high school, the BoD said, Preacher, if you do something like this again, we’ll fire you. My daddy found out about a 2-year training program to becoming a Clinical Chaplain - a mental health counselor. So, he resigned as minister, and we moved to Columbia SC, and he entered training at William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute. 

I was a tweenager when we got there. I had always been a big reader and read even more now. One day, I found a book in the house called the Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis. Like the World Book and the Encyclopedia Britannica, I flipped through this reference book. After a  few months, I told my Daddy what I had been doing and told him I needed to be locked away, “ I (was) the sickest mutherfucker on the face of the planet because I had  EVERYTHING in that book.

And he laughed. Then I learned one of the more valuable lessons of my life. 

He didn’t chortle too long, but it was a surprise. Then came the bigger surprises. He told me he had gone to his mentor at the Hall Institute and said pretty much the same. After his mentor stopped laughing, he said:

“Jim, we ALL have everything in us. It is just to the degree to which we have it that determines which side of the institute’s wall we live in. 

This was my first encounter with the idea of a spectrum, even though the word was never mentioned.

Binary means you only have 2 options: i.e. 0 or 1; black or white; stop or go; right or left; tall or short; child or adult; female or male; rich or poor, etc. There are more examples, I'm sure. Binary works, but not all the time. 

I started thinking about good people vs. bad people. I could think of bad things done by good people and good things done by bad people. I could think of good things I had done and bad things I had done as well. So was I a good person or a bad person? Most people would say I was good, but I didn't think that was accurate. So I started thinking about other people. What about Julius Caesar; Socrates; Plato; Alexander the Great; Christopher Columbus; Pontius Pilate; Kings David and Solomon; Jefferson Davis; Robert E. Lee; Abraham Lincoln; Woodrow Wilson; Teddy Roosevelt; FDR; Dwight Eisenhower: JFK AND RFK; LBJ; J. Edgar Hoover; Herbert Humphrey; Richard Nixon; Jimmy Carter; Ronald Reagan; Hitler and Mussolini. William T. Sherman. Western Heroes. Marvel heroes.

It got very confusing. Even more so when, a couple of years ago, I posted on FB a very condemning statement that the Confederates were traitors to the United States. A dear high school friend disputed that, as some of her relatives (not ancestors) fought for the Confederacy. This really gave me pause.  How do we reconcile that these otherwise good people did bad things?

These are my conclusions: 

1. There is no such thing as good or bad people, as people do good and bad things.

2. Good and bad are not binary but rather on a spectrum. 

Before we move forward, let’s know what a spectrum is. To me, a spectrum is like a number line that stretches infinitely in either direction. There are overlapping items in a continuum stretching in opposite directions. Examples would be:

1. Light was an original spectrum described by Issac Newton. In fact, he discovered such things as: Darkness is just the absence of light; there are many colors of light; and white light is all the colors combined. Later, others discovered infrared and ultraviolet light that is just so far on the spectrum, they are not visible to the human eye. 

2. Think about a color.  Now imagine it darker and lighter. Such as light green or dark blue, and all the shades in between. That is a spectrum.

3. Kiki is my black cat. Now imagine a black panther. Another spectrum.

4. Self esteem v narcissism, Very much a spectrum.

5. The lesser of two evils is a spectrum.

It is this last one that really got me thinking. I have read that some children liked Hitler. This man who murdered people merely because they were Jewish? I no longer believe that Hitler is evil or good. What Hitler DID was evil or good. Yes, he did more bad than good. Yet he was only a person. I find it unimaginable that anyone could find anything positive about this monster. But . . . . They say a broke clock is correct twice a day. 

One thing the American South is infamous for is enslaving Africans. Generations later we are still dealing with the aftermath of this, the American Civil War (and NO, not the War between the States), Reconstruction, Redemption, and the Lost Cause. These generations have generated (pardon the pun) people living today whose ancestors/relatives fought in that war. They want to think of their Great-great (etc) grandparents as being good, not bad. This is one of the things that led me to think of this topic. The South had enslaved Africans for over 100 years before the American Civil War began. Founding fathers, including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Mason, the Pinkneys, Rutledge, and many others, enslaved Africans. These men, who laid the foundations, fought the American Revolution, and created the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, were men these good or evil? 

After the Civil War, Indian problems arose in the American West. I would argue the facts tell us more bad than good was done by both sides.

The men who started the Soviet Union - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et. al. President Ronald Reagan called it the “evil empire.” Czar Nicholas (Romanov) II was the monarch who these “evil” men unseated and ended the rule of one of the longest monarchal families on Earth. 

And this is true of all of us. All of God’s children, and we all are. We all do good things and we all do bad things. We can never be good people, but thankfully, we can never be bad people. We are just humans. And we all, like Thanos in the Marvel Hero movies, think we know best. We can think we are doing good, and we can be wrong, again, just like Thanos. 

Liberals think they know what’s right for the world and the US. Conservatives think the same. Europeans, Asians, Russians, Brazilians, Africans, etc., all have their opinions also. Who’s right? This is one of the questions we will explore. 

Stay tuned for my next topic: Equality. 

Thank you

Jed Daughtry Palmetto Bug