Thoughtful remarks by filmmaker Ken Burns, as quoted in Maureen Dowd's New York Times op-ed essay of 5 July 2025:

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view,” he said. “The only thing that can do that is a good story. Good stories are a kind of benevolent Trojan horse. You let them in, and they add complication, allowing you to understand that sometimes a thing and its opposite are true at the same time.”

... and ...

Burns told us that his half-century of making documentaries about America’s wars and pastimes has taught him to embrace contradictions.

“The binaries that we set up are the biggest trap, whether they come from the left or the right,” he said. “When you see somebody making a ‘them,’ you have to be careful. That’s antithetical to what the Declaration is saying. I hope that what we do on the Fourth of July is try to put the ‘us’ into the U.S.”

... or in Toki Pona, perhaps the key concept:

tenpo lon la, ijo en ijo ala li lon tu

toki pona	loose translation
tenpo lon la, ijo en ijo ala li lon tu	times exist, when thing and not-thing are both true

_{(cf Opposite Thinking (2000-03-16), Franklin on Dogmatism (2008-08-12), ...) - ^z - 2025-07-06}