I seized upon your comment this morning that one doesn’t fly a plane in a straight line but it is a series of adjustments. You continued that parenting is like flying diagonally through a cloud. It prompted this:
I recently attended a dinner party which hosted guests from a wide variety of backgrounds, including one gentleman who, as it turns out, was a rabid political strategist. Being unable to restrain himself, midway through the evening, he violated a cherished social axiom by introducing political ideology into the conversation. His comment referenced his target as being a “flip -flopper” and, therefore, lacking in integrity. Wisely we all let the trial balloon float in the, now, chilled air while his wife threw him a frozen stare. Nonplussed or unaware of the silence that followed his first volley, the provocateur repeated the thrust and left it to hang out there like a noxious weed. Restrain myself as I might, I felt obliged, now that he had launched the second barb, not to allow my own silence to suggest tacit agreement with his charge. I quietly proffered, what some perceived as a tension breaker, that, ” To me, flip-flopping is a virtue which I strongly admire.” I then asked for more potato chips and drifted away.
Although the hot air came out of the subject and we moved on, I remained puzzled that people find some red badge of courage attached to the presumption that one is to be admired because they never changed their position over their lifetime. Am I to admire a guy who puts his thumbs in his suspenders, and claims never to have changed his position since being elected in 1962.” No Siree Bob—no flip-flopping here. Every thought or position I ever had sticks to me like a barnacle.”
But, flip flopping is a way of life. Talk to people from Philadelphia who were starved for a baseball championship and chafed under the power of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine. Pete Rose, while still with the Reds, was vilified in Philly, but when he was traded to Philadelphia and brought them a World Series championship, two million people flip- flopped. A quarterback flip- flops every time he sizes up a defense and calls an audible. Where would we be if Copernicus and Galileo had not flip -flopped on the presumption that the earth was the center of the universe? What if Pasteur had not flip- flopped on the washing of hands before surgery because of bacterial transfer? What if Attila the Hun, hell bent on destroying Rome, had not flip -flopped after meeting Pope Leo I at Rome’s gates and spared the city? Where would Nelson Mandela be if FW de Klerk had not flip- flopped on apartheid? Even Lincoln who was by no means an abolitionist flip -flopped with the Emancipation Proclamation, an act many see as having been closer to political expediency then altruism.
So who are some of the stalwarts who never flip- flopped? Adolph Hitler never flip -flopped concerning his hatred and death sentence for Jews. Rwanda’s Hutus never flip -flopped on their commitment to annihilation and genocide of the Tutsi. The Supreme Court never flip -flopped on its Dred Scott decision condemning blacks to an eternity as chattel to be bought and sold. Bin Laden, Hussain, Charles Taylor, Stalin, and Pol Pot, likewise, could not be accused of flip-flopping.
A story I have, perhaps mistakenly, attributed to Einstein , captures the essence, nonetheless, of flip -flopping and its nature. When a student challenged the aging Einstein as having changed his position on a subject from as recently as the day before, Einstein’s advised his student that –he had just that morning, learned something new. Discovery!
So who are the most guilty of us all when it comes to this ignominious affliction? Not surprisingly, at least to those who have taken the journey, it would be…all parents, feinting and plodding their way along in a series of never ending adjustments. Flip -flopping is the soul and essence of parenting. I don’t mean in terms of strongly held core values but it terms of how we accommodate, teach, learn, grow, struggle, search, pray, agonize, laugh and cry our way through this labyrinth hounded by Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other. Parenting is a series of never ending modifications and changing strategies. There may be no flip- flopping concerning the desire for a healthy outcome, but the road map may be filled with plenty of detours, and some dead ends.
So if ultimately flip -flopping equates to enlightenment, discovery and accommodation I can only respond to a charge of being a flip- flopper by tipping my hat and saying–thanks for the compliment.