Flip Flops

Trey Smith

In all honesty, since I genuinely do not care which corporate candidate wins, I really haven't been paying that much attention to ANY of the ongoing political campaigns. However, from time to time, a political ad comes across the television before I can hit the mute button!!

One of the recurrent themes I've been seeing -- this theme is as old as the hills -- is that the other candidate is a flip-flopper. At one time, he/she said/did one thing and now he/she said/did something else. This is supposed to show that people who change their minds are not to be trusted!

If truth be told, each one of us is a flip-flopper and, believe it or not, flip-flopping isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, sagacious individuals can be some of the worst flip-floppers around.

Just because you or I believe something is good and true doesn't mean that we have to hold onto said belief in the face of new information. When I was 7 years old, I believed that Santa Claus was a real person. By the time I was 10, I had figured out that Santa was a fiction. In terms of my political stance on this issue, I flip-flopped from believing Santa was real to be believing he was not. (I also could have used the example of God. I have flip-flopped from believing in God's existence to now believing there is no God.)

Of course, the whole point in this political exercise of campaign season is to try to show that your opponent doesn't walk his/her talk. In some situations, it's true. Candidate A says one thing for one audience and something altogether different for another audience. In my book, such instances are fair game.

But a lot of the smear tactics pertain to situations in which a candidate actually changed his/her mind about a particular issue or course of action. My reaction to these cases is: So what? People change their minds all the time. There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

To suggest otherwise is petty.