I spent hours touring Poland’s Auschwitz death camp last week. Walking through the huge complex in which approximately 1.1 million people, 90 percent of whom were Jews, were systematically murdered would have been sobering under any circumstances.

 But to visit on the same day that Israel remained poised to invade Gaza and kill countless trapped Palestinians—the same day that Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas released only two more of the 222 Israelis it had kidnapped during the worst mass assassination of Jews since the Holocaust—threw a ghastly light on the tendency to polarize complex situations into two seemingly irreconcilable camps and create absolute enemies.

 For me, as a gay/queer white employed Jew living in relatively safe (for me) Port Townsend, the situation abroad remains anything but black and white. Homosexuality remains taboo in Palestine and same-sex marriage is banned. In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, however, same-sex relationships are legal, many LGBTQ rights protections exist and you can legally change your gender.

 Do I automatically reject calls for a two-state solution and join with the polarizing Netanyahu to cry for merciless vengeance? Do I stuff my own self-interest (as have countless LGBTQ people throughout history) and side with Palestinians being murdered by the uncompromising Israeli government? Must I take sides?

 My mind kept jumping from Auschwitz and Gaza to Port Townsend. Would the Nazis have forced me to wear a pink triangle or the Jewish star or both? Would I have been gassed to death early on? Are Jews a “race” that needs to be extinguished in order for the purity of other races to survive?

 Are LGBTQ people predatory “groomers” by nature, and are transgenders the ultimate threat to family, God, and country? As absurd as these dualities may be, they reflect false narratives that continue to motivate people to wage war on one another in Jefferson County as much as abroad.

 One teaching that the late Elisabeth Kübler-Ross shared with me during her five-day Life Death and Transition intensive is that each one of us has an inner Mother Theresa and an inner Adolf Hitler. We are all Beings of Light and we are all Beings of Darkness. We are all God and Devil simultaneously. Each and every second of our lives, we have the opportunity to choose between affirming life and peace or perpetuating evil and antagonism.

 Duality is the nature of humanity. Those who are unwilling to acknowledge their dark side are fated to externalize it—to project our darkness onto the “other” and make them the cause of our woes.

 It may seem like a huge leap to transition from the unbearable no-exit realities of Auschwitz to the more gentle realities of Port Townsend and Jefferson County, but duality knows no bounds. Port Townsend has had its own pretty intense immersion in the dark side over the last decade. From the challenge of finding affordable housing to basic threats to the right to fully control our identities and bodies, our ever-transforming hamlet has been wracked with controversy.

 Around battles involving the golf course, pool, potholes, deer, zoning, endemic racism, affordable housing, taxes, school curriculum, and access to knowledge lies the temptation to abandon nuance in favor of absolutes and polarizing false narratives.

 It is time to abandon false narratives. It is possible to oppose a new pool or a work of art without making our Mayor, his fellow City Council members, City officials, or the residents of Port Townsend the enemy. It is time to stop repeating history.