Objectivity!!

Objectivity may be an excellant guiding focus when one is writing journalistically, or when one cares for simple knowledge in general. Yet I believe that it is only when you truly throw your heart into something and are able to see things from a larger perspective than what your head can teach you are you really able to live.

Objectivity teaches you not to care, not to get involved, and thus enables you to make more discoveries and gain more knowledge. Yet if you cannot see things from points of view other than the academic, what is the point? The film "The Medicine Man," for example. The characters are torn between using the last amount of a cure for cancer on a sick child or analyizing it to learn how to make more. For the good of the world, they should have chosen the latter. They chose instead to save the child and this choice from a scientific standpoint may have been incredibly wrong. But from a moralistic view, it couldn't have been more right. When you decide not to take aside, not to take a stand; you lose your identity as a person and become a stainless steel labratory—cold and empty.

If you throw your heart into something, and believe in it with all you have in you, you may find something you didn't know you were looking for. In the San Juan Islands, there is a place I care deeply about and have for the past ten years. It was the most beautiful piece of property I'd ever seen, grzed & wooded and placed neatly on the edge of a mountain lake. But others didn't see it the same way and made plans to turn my forest into a casino. However, I gathered friends who felt the same and we stayed in the woods for over a week, protesting. The land was saved. I afterwards discovered that there was an old man who lived there, who would not have budged if it killed him. Had I been a mere objective observer, I would have allowed the destruction of a beautiful forest & a peaceful old man. I have a heart, though, and I can take aside. I can protect those things that mean so much.

So tell me, what is the use of objectivity if it turns you into a lifeless robot? There is so much more than that, so have a heart & take it!