We either like ‘em or not. No middle ground for discussion.
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Grits, a staple of the South. Corn, stone ground, boiled, buttered, red-eye gravy and cheese. If served with country ham and biscuits the size of baseballs, it’s as close to heaven as you can get.
What? It turns your tummy, you say? Then relocate before you contaminate the culture.
Grits don’t agree with everyone’s taste. There is no middle ground to tastes. You either like something or you don’t. If the taste of grits doesn’t suit you, then you were either born wrong or somewhere north of here. Maybe you preferred sucking your thumb, but grits were our Manna.
Now, personally, I don’t much like the taste of liver. Similar to bear meat, it has the propensity to multiply itself. Chew it, it grows. It won’t go down. Pass it around. One bite of the disgusting meat will feed an entire army.
My mother tried hard to get me to like it. She would say, “Son, it will put iron in your blood.” I remember telling her I’d just as soon continue licking a rusty nail to get the same result. Pity mothers trying to raise adolescent boys. She finally threw in the towel and probably spent her liver budget at the beauty parlor. Who could blame her?
Listen, there’s no middle ground to taste. You have yours, I have mine. But not so cut and dried are the ‘middle grounds’ of life. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself hung up in one, trying to get consensus or to escape the conflagration of conflict.
It’s in the ‘middle ground’ where all the action takes place, mano a mano. It’s where left grapples with right, where truth fights fiction, where love examines its hidden motives, and where the wall of partition between politics remains firmly fixed.
The outer margins of things are trivial when looking for compromise. They’re no threat to the middle ground. They’re disposable claptrap, easy to negotiate around, to compromise with, or to dismiss. Give a little, take a little, ever moving towards a center. No big winners or losers, not a zero-sum game yet. The spirit of cordiality is still alive. But not for long.
As the middle ground begins to collapse, it becomes a vice. Nerves become tightly twisted. Inflexible positions take hold, heels dig in, push comes to shove, snarls replace smiles, meaningful words are exchanged, tempers rise. At this stage, the outer limits of cooperation have reached an impasse. From here on in its clubs, knives and guns.
But back to grits. Ok, so you don’t like ‘em. Maybe from a distance you can bear to see them boiling, maybe even endure the smell of them cooking. No trouble there. But when a steaming heap is set on your plate, well, there’s the rub, the pushback. You’ve gone your last mile.
Suppose you’re an invited dinner guest and grits end up on your plate. There they are, all buttery and steaming, staring back at you next to your favorite, fried quail. They mock you. The bile in your belly begins to boil. You know what’s about to happen. Now what?
Your choices are limited. You’ve just reached your final negotiating position at the table of the invisible middle ground. No further. What to do?
Like Houdini, you do the next best thing…confuse the issue. You surreptitiously stir the foul food briskly with your fork, spread it around, sacrifice a couple good stalks of asparagus by laying them atop the vile dish. Then you disguise and obfuscate it beneath crumbs of the biscuit for its final internment. Reputation saved.
But none of this is necessary if you’re a connoisseur of grits. You would crawl across the hot coals of any middle ground just to put a spoonful of them in your mouth. But try to convince someone who detests this delicacy to even taste them, why you’d have better luck convincing a frog to hop into a pot of boiling water just to see if it could survive the encounter. Drop the issue. Quick. No middle ground here to win.
So much for the analogy of grits for strategies of escaping the mine fields of life’s middle grounds. Life situations are stickier and more consequential than dealing with grits. But when you find yourself entering the no-man’s-land of verbal conflict, remember: Confuse, Disguise and Obfuscate.
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Take it from the frog…when it comes to middle grounds, the best advice is to avoid the hot water altogether.
Bud Hearn
February 19, 2024