Not Really One or the Other

A few posts ago, I wrote about why I would never be a conservative, or at least not a good one. I read a lot of pundit blogs, and war blogs, and just blogs period, and I find that (at least to some people) it can be important to identify yourself in those terms, if only so people don't assume that you are a like minded soul with whom they can commiserate about how the world's going to hell.
Well, today's bit is about how I don't think I'll ever be a good liberal, either.
Take the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I've read so much about this from so many conflicting viewpoints that I sometimes sit and wonder if we're all living on the same planet. It's a good lesson in how everything is subjective, I suppose, and that there are no empiricals, no absolutes of good and evil; or rather, that there is nothing that is purely good or purely evil, but only a swirling mixture of the two in varying proportions. With the conflict in Israel, I see the Israelis as basically doing what they feel they have to, and I don't condemn them for that. I think that killing people is a bad thing, and whether you're doing it for the right or the wrong reason doesn't make it any less bad. I get the sense that the Israelis understand that, and that the Palestinians somehow don't. It's one thing to be a soldier, and to choose to do what you feel is right even if you know it might get you killed. It's quite another thing to be a suicide bomber, knowing that you're going to die even if no-one else does. And it's a third, utterly repulsive and despicable thing to convince someone, by virtue of their youth, inexperience, and some sort of religious authority (I guess!), to become a suicide bomber. I think even the inestimable Mr. Lileks would commend me on making that judgment. What I don't think that he and a lot of others feel is what I feel, and that is a certain sorrow - maybe even anguish - for the Palestinian mother who loses her children, and for those who lose their homes for whatever reason. It makes me sick inside that people can look around and see that the world/nature/laws of physics makes no provisions or exceptions for us, that the planet we live in is a hard, hard place to be and that people can yet go on and make things worse by living in hatred and causing death.
Y'know, I think it's that peculiar little disability of mine that keeps me from ever really being one thing and one thing only. I always see both sides, and how both are right AND wrong to some degree. It's the way everything is, in my opinion. To quote the Bible (which I never do): 'In the midst of life, we are in death.' At the cellular level, we've started to die before we're even formally born. Every part of good on this planet has its own sort of evil; nature can be calm and beautiful and inspiring, but like the wise ones before us said, it can also be 'red in tooth and claw.' Even a tree can look like a harmless, productive organism from one perspective, and a factory of phytochemicals that poisons its predators and competitors and shades its smaller rivals to death. It's all just a struggle, and for every winner there's a loser.
A lot of people would tell me that this particular take on things is just another way to duck responsibility, I guess. You know, that not committing to anything is the coward's way out, you have to take a stand sometime, and so on. Well, I had a lot of philosophy in college, and I can tell you that once you take God out of the equation, there's no justification for anything. I myself never was really big on having God in the equation to begin with; I haven't made up my mind on whether he's there or not, but granting that he is as a premise, I still can't posit him being any more interested in us than I am in the social interaction of E. Coli. I wanted to believe for a long time in the humanist line, that things mean something because (puff out your chest) dammit, they HAVE TO mean something. If God won't give us absolutes, we'll look to nature or science or... well, most people are stuck right there flipping back and forth between those two channels. That, or they live by the code of 'My Parents Told Me So,' which pretty much guarantees that they didn't learn anything at all from their parents.
Now, I'm not exactly looking to be convinced, either. It's not like I'm just waiting for that one devastating argument that will make it all slip into place, and make everything from peace in the middle east to the ultimate question of life (why? and why now?) all slip into place. People who are just waiting for that kind of reason always find it in the worst possible places, and become skinheads or Jehovah's Witnesses or lifetime McDonald's employees.
No, I think I'm gonna stay right where I am: on the outside, looking in.