I recently came across a top 10 debates list, seen on My Top Ten Lists:

Top 10 Debates

1. Pro Choice Vs. Pro Life
2. Anti­war Vs. Pro War
3. For or Against Death Penalty
4. Breast­feed­ing Vs. Bot­tle feed­ing
5. Demo­c­ra­tic Vs. Repub­li­can
6. Evo­lu­tion Vs. Reli­gion
7. For or Against Gay Rights
8. Nat­ural Births Vs. C-sections
9. For or Against Prayer in Schools
10. Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State Debate

I first started to debate when I was about 15 years old. French edu­ca­tion value essays, which we had to orga­nize in to 3 parts : intro­duc­tion, devel­op­ment and con­clu­sion, each part being itself divided into sev­eral para­graphs etc. We trained for sev­eral years, prac­tic­ing with non-politically cor­rect sub­jects, such as “Why is DUI a bless­ing for the soci­ety”, “Is school really use­less ?” etc. Just to show us that any­thing could be argued.

Any­way, we always stayed in the safe-zone. Peace is good, war, world hunger are bad and so is AIDS, the US are wrong and Europe is the good one. Who could blame us ? Grow­ing up in a coun­try, every­body is short-sighted. Nobody truly knows the neigh­bor. We were just brainwashed.

When I went to China, my whole world just crashed. Not only I was seen as an immi­grant and a for­eigner for the first time of my life (a Euro­pean vis­it­ing another Euro­pean coun­try isn’t really a for­eigner…), but I also real­ized that every­thing I’ve been told about China was wrong. Europe val­ues pol­i­tics and has a “being against every­thing” atti­tude, while North Amer­ica val­ues indi­vid­u­al­ism. Well, China value the country’s well-being and inter­ests before the indi­vid­u­als. Seen from this per­spec­tive, every­thing made sense. The one child pol­icy was merely one way to man­age the country’s boom­ing demo­graphic, nation­al­ism was a reac­tion to years of for­eign inva­sion, and CCP’s pro­pa­ganda wasn’t worse than west­ern polit­i­cal campaign’s. Wow. Talk about a shock.

Each back­pack­ing trip I made since then brought more ques­tions about the world we live in. Get­ting to under­stand our neigh­bors I guess. How could I blame South America’s street cor­rup­tion ? It’s just another form of econ­omy, prob­a­bly less hyp­o­crit­i­cal than what­ever big cor­po­ra­tion lob­by­ing in Europe or North Amer­ica. How could I blame Mex­i­can for sneak­ing into the USA ? Weren’t they allowed a share of the cake placed on the table in front of them ? Drug trade in South Amer­ica ? Let me just remind you who was trad­ing opium a lit­tle over a cen­tury ago in China… That’s right, United King­dom. Are you against ter­ror­ism ? Well, me too, but at least I’m hon­est enough to admit we started the whole thing by invad­ing half of the world, forc­ing peo­ple to adopt roman Catholi­cism as their one and only reli­gion and rul­ing over what’s good and bad for many centuries.

Give me a break. Who are we to decide who is right and who is wrong ? It sure is much eas­ier to be con­ser­v­a­tive and to hold on to self-proclaimed val­ues and much harder to ques­tion every­thing and to adapt to the sit­u­a­tion.
I remem­ber one night in Cen­tral Amer­ica, had this big fight with Feng over pol­i­tics. I was still big on pol­i­tics at the time.Any­way, for the first time of my life, I was meet­ing some­one who didn’t believe in left-wing nor right-wing. Shit, what was I sup­posed to say to fight back ? The ini­tial argu­ment took an unex­pected turn. I though that every­thing was polit­i­cal and had no clue there were some beliefs not linked to either. I was expect­ing some kind of con­ven­tional reply, like “left-wing is great” and “let’s free Tibet” — instead, I got an heated Feng who was dis­miss­ing pol­i­tics and prob­a­bly prais­ing dic­ta­tor­ship (although he might have praised monar­chy or anar­chy — depends on the mood). I real­ized that my coun­try and cul­ture had imprinted some­thing into my brain. I was brain­washed too. I took some stuffs for granted, had a taboo over oth­ers and that was my phi­los­o­phy. No as open-minded that I thought.

Truth is, one has to adapt to his envi­ron­ment. This was what I’ve done wrong. I car­ried my French beliefs — to a cer­tain extend — across the world, and my Parisian pol­i­tics weren’t applic­a­ble here. Feng didn’t know and didn’t care about pol­i­tics and he was eas­ily dis­miss­ing my belief. I had to fight with other weapons to reach the target.

We still prac­tice argu­ments to this day, mostly for the sake of it. I some­times get extremely frus­trated over what I con­sider “cheap shots”. We would start argu­ing about some­thing and Feng fires up, blam­ing every­one and every­thing. I learned to fight back and to use my knowl­edge about the world to inter­pret it my way rather than answer­ing some stimuli.

Does argu­ing hurts ? It sure does. Nobody likes to admit being wrong and to recon­sider his beliefs. It is use­ful ? Yes. It only we would be less short-sighted…

Related arti­cles:

1. One, Two, Three, What Are We Fight­ing For ?
2. Every­day, The Paper­boy Brings More…
3. The Cul­ture Of Fear
4. Takes A Sec­ond To Say Goodbye
5. Human Beans