Not so long ago, maybe a generation or two back, all things were black or white. There was no middle ground. Expectations were clear. One either fell on one side of an issue or the other. The thing was – there were people who fell in the middle. People who had no defined spot. They were neither here nor there – so they were nowhere.

No one deserves to be no where.

Nowadays, in our generation, those children desperately coming of age as parents of their own children, everywhere we look there are different shades of gray. Fifty is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many nuanced pitfalls to navigate.

Instead of yes or no, everything is up for discussion. We don’t want our children to do a particular thing, make a particular decision, live a particular lifestyle, but we cannot condemn it – for we run the risk of offending someone. We do not want our children to condemn others or other points of view – so we skirt around topics instead of facing them head-on. We live in a constant haze of gray.

But if everything goes, everything is everywhere – does that not leave all of us nowhere?

Our children will not know where to stand if we place everything in front of them with no guidance, no discussion, no sense of right and wrong. There is a difference between open, informed dialogue and an all-you-can-eat buffet of sociology.

If the pendulum trended toward the restrictive threat of ostracization before, it has now swung toward the promiscuous promise of floating in the wind. There must be somewhere in the middle.

Floating in the wind is nice – until you tire of it and realize you’ve nowhere to land. A place to land – we owe the next generation at least that.

                from nuji.com