What The BBT????!!!!!!!

I am one of those people who generally sees the validity in both sides of an argument.  Call me a fence sitter if you will.  Perhaps it comes from having spent my teenage years passionately arguing points of politics, religion and society with my father, a.k.a. the devils' advocate.  Well, I called it arguing.  Dad called it debating.  It was probably a fair bit of both.

In the middle of a quiet evening he would bait the hook with a wriggly and tastily controversial worm - a comment which he knew would ignite a spark in my idealist mind.  The communists / refugees / unemployed / Catholics / married women in the workforce.....   He had a whole string of them and he knew I couldn't resist the bait.  The worm taken, he would slowly begin to reel me in.

At about this point, those of my family less comfortable with confrontation would quickly and quietly leave the room.  Then it was on.  The wrangling, the tousling, the search for that one point that would convince him that he was being narrow-minded; that he was wrong and I was right.  The best we could ever really hope for was a truce.  Agree to disagree.  If we could.  At worst it ended with us not talking to each other for a couple of hours afterwards.

The absolute beauty of it was that it was a chance for both of us to explore the issues of the time and to find our way to our own truths, to what we could really believe in.  He was arguing the beliefs he had been brought up with and taught not to question.  In his fifties, he had the freedom to question and the help of an opinionated teenage daughter to argue / debate it all with.  A child of the 1930's, he was raised to fear the 'other'; the Commos, the Micks, the foreigners.  He could have become a narrow- minded bigot but he chose to explore the ideas and beliefs he had grown up with, pulling them apart to see what truth there was to them.  And lucky me.  I got to go along on the ride, my bag packed with youthful idealism and in need of a good dose of reality.  Together we fought through so many issues.  Ultimately it was a fight towards open-mindedness and acceptance.  Towards finding the validity in both sides of the argument.

These days, I get a fair bit of flack from a good friend who sees me so often weighing up both sides, looking for the balance.  He calls it the Blair Balance Theory.  Sounds good to me.
Thanks Dad.  Thanks Risto.