I’m going to Rutland Criminal Court this afternoon in the hope of attending the first court hearing involving Craig Mosher, indicted for involuntary manslaughter. Mosher’s bull Red got out of the fence last July and was hit by a car. Red and the driver, Jon Bellis, were killed. The police say Red got out a number of times before the fatal accident and when Mosher was notified by a truck driver that the bull was in the road just before the accident, he failed to respond, even went back to sleep.

Those are accusations, we don’t know if they are true.

A Rutland prosecutor named Rose Kennedy has taken this farm accident and made it a criminal case, alleging extreme negligence and recklessness on Mosher’s part.

Mosher, a local hero for his work opening roads after Hurricane Irene, is popular in his town, respected as a caring animal lover and rescuer and little league coach. He is clearly a community-minded person, not a habitual criminal.

The case is complex, there are many elephants in the room.

Farmers everywhere fear this will become another tool used against them by prosecutors and hostile  and poorly informed animal rights activists to make their lives much more difficult, and for animals lovers, it threatens to criminalize animal escapes and incidents that have always – always – been considered accidents, not crimes.

Some farmers say they already euthanizing cows who escape too often, others are locking them in barns all summer rather than risk arrest and prosecution of they escape from their grazing fields. There are already reports of people (not farmers) refusing to lease their land to farmers for grazing because they fear legal confrontations, now criminal legal confrontations.

There are two sides to everything, and this story has become complex and difficult. If the police reports are accurate, Mosher had multiple warnings about his animals getting through his fences and chose to neglect them. That is damning, if true.

That is the very core of involuntary manslaughter charges. There is no doubt that the prosecutor has chosen to escalate and make much more serious one of the familiar elements of rural life – animals getting through fences. The issue is whether or not this is justified.

This kind of thing happens every day in rural communities and in cities and suburbs as well.  Most Americans have lost touch with farm life, and the cost and complexity of things like fences. Good fences cost a fortune, they are way too expensive for most farmers to buy, they have to build them themselves with electric wire and wooden posts. These fences often stretch for miles, through brush and trees and around old stone walls.

A hundred things can break or bend them, and no farmer can patrol these vast and often invisible spaces two or three times a day. I’ve seen people on Facebook say “well, he just should have repaired his fence,” and perhaps this is so. But not to fast. If you lived on a farm, it wouldn’t seem to simple a task to  you.

Animal lovers and farmers are also understandably and deeply concerned about this case. So are people who can relate to the family that lost a loved one because a bull got through a fence that perhaps ought to have been repaired, and that the owner knew about.

We  have not yet heard from Mr. Mosher or his lawyers.

This story is already a metaphor for many things, including the polarized and absolutist way in which we are conditioned to take all or nothing positions on difficult issues. Oppositional thinking has become a cancer in our culture, a kind of illness. It travels on the super-highway that is social media, a gift to the angry and ill-informed and righteous.

I got a message from my friend Eve Marko last night, she is a Zen teacher and a good and wise friend and human being:

“I continue to enjoy your posts,” she wrote. “Interesting regarding the ambiguity that has come in regarding Mosher. Recently I read a Buddhist scholar write that in Buddhism, nothing is oppositional. Meaning that nothing is ever black and white, this vs. this, nothing is that clean. These labels are less and less relevant.”

Labels are less relevant in the world at large, but very relevant in our political system right now, and in our personal and digital communications. People on the left and the right believe that everything is black and white, this versus that, and that their side is clean and the other side is always dirty. Our political leaders have embraced oppositional thinking – this is Donald Trump’s stated philosophy – as a necessary survival tool, it has paralyzed Congress and poisoned public discourse.

In our politics, and in our online discussions, we preach and practice hatred for different points of view. We never admit we were wrong, change our minds, or compromise. There is no color but black and white.

Our politics is defined by  oppositional thinking. The only question is who will do it more effectively. This is also true in the animal world, now just as polarized as the political world.

The left and the right exists in permanent and perpetual opposition to each other, the system is not built to negotiate or reach consensus or find solutions, but to refuse to compromise or negotiate and fix rigid labels on beliefs and the people who share and practice them. According to the Free Dictionary, oppositional thinking the act of opposing or resisting, the condition of being in conflict, or opposing ideas. If you listen to any presidential debates or read almost all of the statements of political candidates on both sides, you will hear nothing but conflict and opposition.

That is oppositional thinking, you can hear and see it every day.

The Mosher case challenges me to step back and recognize that there are no simple answers to some issues.

I already believe this, I reject political labels for myself and believe there are two sides to just about everything. When I first heard of the Mosher case, it did seem black and white to me. Animal escapes are such a common feature of rural life – and I live in the country – that I had an instant concern about what this sudden criminalizing of what was always seen as an accident could do to farmers and animal owners and lovers.

As often happens in cases relating to animals, the prosecutor seemed to have overreached, and the toxically oppositional shock troops of the animal rights movement would surely not be far behind. Talk about oppositional thinking.

But as Eve suggested, this is not so simple, not so clear, not anywhere near black-and-white. This is why I want to go to the court hearing myself and get a look at the principals and a feel for the case. I learned as a reporter that sometimes you just have to go and see and listen and feel.

It is difficult for me to accept the idea that Craig Mosher ought to go to jail – one to 15 years – because his much-loved bull Red got through his fence. But I believe in the practice of empathy as well as thoughtfulness and I can well understand members of a family wanting someone to be held accountable for the death of someone beloved to them in an accident that might easily have been prevented.

If the police are correct, Mosher was warned more than once.

On the other hand, and there is always another hand, the rights of farmers and animal lovers have been threatened and challenged in a serious way in recent years, and their concerns also need to be considered and protected.  The prosecutor has given no indication that she is aware of this or is concerned about it.

If this case in any way elevates the war on farmers and people who live and work with animals, then it becomes a far more troubling and complicated matter than it already appears to be.

Nothing about this case is clean or simple, which makes is significant as well as tragic. I do not believe in oppositional thinking, I think it is a cancer on our world. And I have to be careful not to let my head be clouded by the past several years, in which I have explored and written about injustice after injustice wreaked on farmers and animal lovers by prosecutors and well-meaning people who have lost any sense of truth and perspective.

So I’ll happy make the two-hour drive to Rutland, a chance, maybe, to understand this awful happening in a better way and more helpful, and to try to find a comfortable space in a collision of values and circumstances that may well make a simple judgment impossible.

How do you find clarity when something is not clean?