We’ve all read a lot about Greece, and there’s nothing worthwhile I can add. I’d like to try out a thought — not something you’d put between hard covers, or even, probably, the soft covers of a magazine, but maybe something okay for a blog.

The Greek question has made me think about parenting. Say you have a kid who has screwed up for a long, long time. You’ve told him over and over, and he hasn’t listened. Now his world has come crashing down, and he needs to learn his lesson. He needs to face the consequences of his bad decisions. He needs to straighten up and fly right. You’re loath to intervene, because you don’t want him to lose the lesson. A bailout would do him no favors.

And yet — you don’t want him to die.

The thing about sink-or-swim is that, sometimes, people sink. “Tough love” is wonderful, and wise, but in a few cases it is of no avail. The love is tantamount to abdication.

I sense that people like me have a certain Schadenfreude about Greece, because that country is an excellent example of the perils of statism. Let the bastards suffer for the lousy choices they have made. That’ll teach ’em.

That is certainly my instinct, believe me.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: We have the added pleasure of the comeuppance of the EU. Heh.

But are we — “we,” the world, this nebulous entity — willing to see Greece a failed state? The ramifications of that would be awful. Are we (“we”) willing to see Greece a pet of Uncle Vlad?

I don’t think there are clear-cut answers on Greece. Anyone who tells you there are should be doubted. Tom Sowell once spoke of the “nuance excuse.” I can’t stand that excuse. I think that more situations are black-and-white than people realize, or admit. Gray may be a cool color. Black and white are said to be unsophisticated. But often they are true colors.

Greece, however? The skies above it are famously sunny, but Greece is gray, as a question.

I don’t envy leaders in Europe, and elsewhere, who have to make decisions about Greece. It’s easy for a pundit to pop off — we never have to take responsibility for anything. The buck (or drachma) stops somewhere else. We can be cocksure in our blogposts and tweets and whatnot. But Greece is a terrible and hard problem (and individual lives are being wrecked as we speak).