Heads or tails?

So much of what we are reading about and dealing with today are two different perspectives on the same situation. Two different visuals of the same thing. When you pick up a penny and flip it, you may get heads or you may get tails – but you still have the same penny.

A family all on their phones in a restaurant is a broken unit that doesn’t communicate. A family who’s spent the day visiting grandpa in the hospital appreciates together downtime and a meal.

People on Medicaid don’t work. People on Medicaid can’t work.

A woman that marries a man who dies a few weeks later is a tragic figure. A woman who marries a dying man, and in the few remaining weeks of his life while he’s hospitalized and medicated his beneficiaries change, is a woman with a lot of money.

In some cases, there’s a clear right and wrong side. But generally I think both sides of the penny have some level of truth.

Sometimes we are unaware. Sometimes we choose to be ignorant. Sometimes we just choose wrong.

A lot more of us have to be willing to look at the other side of the coin with a mindset like what am I missing or what would I think if this was me, or someone in my family? We have to stop being afraid to look at the other side of the coin. We have to stop acting like we lose if we give the other side any attention. We have to have open and honest dialogue about both sides.

We also have to stop refusing to admit when we are wrong. Sometimes you don’t know until you know – like Medicaid is not mostly utilized by people who don’t want to work but mostly by people who can’t work or who lost their job. Maybe they had a tragic accident or their child is critically ill.

We can’t rely on politicians to talk about or even look at both sides of the coin. They don’t benefit in that. We, the people, must do it – refusing to believe there are two coins. We must approach issues as they really are: and sometimes that’s two sides of the same coin.