Flip-flops are a type of shoe. That is all.

I know a guy who gets upset when people change their minds.  He thinks politicians are wishy-washy if they reverse their opinions.  He points to a money trail when organizations rethink their policies.  He believes that people should stick to what they believe.  I get what he's saying.  But here's the deal: it's not that simple. In fact, the most intelligent people I know carry around conflicting paradigms and embody those paradigms' constantly fluctuating harmonization.
Polarized thinking seems to be our current society's downfall. Hence, a fiscal cliff over which a bridge was not built nor from which lemmings leaped. Politicians kicked the can down the road. And what choice did they have but to do so? To represent their constituencies, politicians have to be hard-nosed liberals or stubborn conservatives. Even a mere glance toward the middle, or God forbid, the other side, and there's a mass exodus from their support base. But if we could peel back scalps and peer into, perhaps not the thoughts themselves, but the processes that form them, I think we'd see that nobody is truly as flat as paper. We're all more dimensional than that. We believe in contradicting values. We make exceptions to our own rules based on circumstance. We do things we never dreamed ourselves capable of doing, both good and bad. It's the people who realize themselves to be so 'hypocritical' who can harmonize their thinking without ridding themselves of the dimension and produce rational ideas. They're people like Juan Williams, writing in Muzzled about how political debate is stifled by political correctness. And earlier, Rhana Reiko Rizzuto, redefining what it means to be a mother in Hiroshima in the Morning. And here, I'm going to be pretentious, and voice that I have no affinity for either of these people, but that while I disagree with them, personally, I see the value in what they have to say and I do agree with them, philosophically. I attempt to put into practice the harmonization of which I'm speaking. I attempt to be one of the intelligent, to see the thing for what it really is.  Does this mean that I'm not holding to my belief system?  I don't think so.