When it's near "Your" heart...

Are we a flexible people are what? When crime or hard times are happening 1000 miles away, we say... Damn. When someone talks about cloning or doing something totally different from what is the "norm", we say "No Way!" We can be completely "anti" anything at any given time. I am sometimes the worst one for this. I have my thoughts and my convictions and you can't sway me. Or can you!?
Move that crime or the hard times next door or in my home and life and then ask me again how I feel. Let a doctor or Judge turn a rapist or pedophile free, but before he does, tell him he has to let the perp live next door to him. See how slow the paperwork to release becomes.Our thoughts change as well as our willingness to understand why some people are pro this or anti that when it touches our lives personally. I was told from childhood that the Native Americans said "Do not condemn a man until you have walked in his shoes." I believe this to be as strong and true as the "Golden Rule."
I want you to think about an article I read this weekend. It was a recap of a family that had the heart of a monkey placed in their baby girls body in an attempt to save her life. I remember the horrible things people said then and how it was called everything from inhuman to an abomination. And then I thought of my own daughters. I thought too of my Sheila. I was one back then that thought "Oh My God, they are playing God." But I had not walked in that families shoes. It wasn't my baby or my Sheila that laid there in front of me, dieing. If someone would have come to me 2 years ago, as I sat beside my Love and watched the life go out of her and said "We can save her and give her back to you", I would have said "show me how!"
I think of Stem Cell Research and how very adamant I was against anything to do with it at one time. I am not writing to argue the rights or wrongs here. I am merely showing how we can have a change of thoughts or heart when it becomes a reality in our own home and life. I was against the use of such things until someone I love very dearly was saved and her cancer knocked out by Stem Cell Treatment. It made me rethink all I had and open my mind a bit more.
One more such thing that I had other thoughts on and perhaps still do, I think. Cloning. Shhhhhhh, I know, such a naughty word, yet once again I say "bring it inside your own home." To tell me that My Sheila could still be with me today or that one for my daughters would live a longer, better life because they cloned a liver or heart for her would cause me to rethink my inhibitions about this procedure.
My point being here is the fact that our entire outlook on everything we know or think can be changed by simply placing "It always happens to someone else" along side of "It could happen to me or mine." See how your thoughts swirl and your mind goes in a hundred directions. Directions that we so easily say "not mine" to. If I have done nothing else here, I have given you some very interesting reading material in links. And perhaps, I have given you food for thought. I know there is very little that I would not try if it meant making my family live better, healthier. But then... that is just me.