Through some circumstance, I ate dinner the other night while The Andy Griffith Show played in the background. The episode, which a search reveals to be called 'The County Nurse', was about Andy and Barney trying to convince some backwoods country bumpkin with very freeman notions to get a community tetanus shot.

The episode features a scene where the country bumpkin walks out with a rifle and commences firing at the two police officer leads. My mind immediately went to a categorical place: "Yep, that's attempted murder of a police officer. Bad bad thing. Should be going to jail for many years."

The show then surprised me with by not going to that categorical place: 'Sure, he's backward and a little dumb, but he's not a bad sort' was the sentiment. 'Let's take him in and deal with the situation without making a major case out of it.'

I contemplated this different sensibility. Was I jumping in too hard on my rigid rules approach? Can we really do that - treat a guy and his violent ways like 'not a bad sort', and just say it's his way? Seems extreme.

The mental connection I then made was to moments in the modern day where I was on the other side of arguments of people and their actions. For example, when talking about the tricky morass of human sexual interaction, I have often suggested that it is not a sign of an evil, irredeemable human if they go in for physical contact and make a mistake about how well it might be reciprocated. And that there's just tons of gray in all these interactions to consider, and it does no good to want to call the cops and be blindly strict to the technical definition of sexual assault every time that happens.

In online debates, I would then be informed that, no, that was always sexual assault, period. Like people who snapped to recognize the bad thing in order to get a proverbial cookie from the teacher for a right answer, it was this rigid, black-and-white, inflexible thinking to me. And their answers for social solution involved contrived things like affirmative consent which have now become far more mainstream, rather than just accepting a little more case-by-case greyness, which seemed far more sensible to my mind.

And so the question: Did my inability to connect with that old black-and-white show, and it's hint of old-timey sensibility, reflect opposite of some of the things I argue against now? Am I just as much a victim of changing times and sensibilities molding my thinking as anyone else, and the only difference between me and those I argue against now a different birth year? Is there solid principle to be found, or is it all just relative and generational?