How far is too far?

If you live long enough, and you have any curiosity at all, you become an observer and archivist of changing cultural norms. What was outlandish yesterday is normative today. What was accepted yesterday is repulsive today.

Comedy suffers from shifts in perception.

Metaphors cloud over.

For instance, my father-in-law Chub Rogers had a favorite. If we got a little too zealous in a home project or shorted a board or  made any other amateur error, he's say, "Tom, we went to far in that beauty booth."

It took years for me to track down that reference to "Gertrude" in Louis Jordan's song, "You Died Your Hair Chartreuse."

Frankly, I see colors like that in hair every day and even I have come to appreciate the creativity, flair, and individualism they represent.

But it wasn't always that way.

It has been the same with out-of-the-box ideas that independent thinkers have bounced off of my brain through the years. Some caused me to shiver in a chilly wind of uncertain context. Others have so challenged my locked-in thinking that I have found it difficult to maintain my footing in the debate.

Many of those have actually dug their way into the foundations of my thinking after I mulled them over and found them rooted in the logical progression of what I already believed. 

Others have challenged those core beliefs.

Some continue to do so and some, I continue to find outside the realm of my own conviction.

But most have found a home somewhere.

So, how far is too far?

Is it necessary to introduce something new with some level of shock and awe? Is it crucial to shout it out or demonstrate it with explosive visual effects in order for it to be seen, heard, considered, moderated, or modified?

Do we really need to be afraid of the color, "chartreuse?"

Is there room for the dramatic and radical on the road to a center-point of balanced truth?

Or could we at least talk about it?