What Socks You Got On?

"What socks you got on?"
"What colours your socks today?"
"Lemme see your socks!"
These questions were fired at me daily. Michael, a 16 year old lad recently admitted to the ward, had an obsession with socks; specifically what colour they were. The answer pretty much determined how he would behave on any given day.
White socks were a huge problem. For some unknown reason, he associated white socks with bad people. Now, while I'm the first to admit that white socks are often a fashion faux-pas, I wouldn't actively persecute  wearers of them. Michael, on the other hand, was quite likely to attempt to beat them up. I wore a pair once, as an experiment, and spent most of the day hiding in the office while Michael glared menacingly at me through the window.
Black socks were safe. Michael, upon seeing a pair of black socks, would give a big sigh of relief, as if he knew nothing bad was going to happen to him that day. When I first met Michael, I wore black socks most of the time, and he would happily sit beside me, he believed whatever I told him and was generally happy to do things that I asked of him. Black socks were, apparently, the sign of a trustworthy person. 
After a while, I became bored with always having black socks to show Michael, so I went sock-shopping. I bought socks in bright colours, socks with spots on, socks with stripes on, even socks with monkeys and mice on. I wore a pair of my new socks to work, and proudly displayed them when Michael came to me with the inevitable question; "what socks you got on?" He looked at the bright colour and the funky pattern, shrugged and wandered off to pose the same question to someone else. He then ignored me for the rest of the day. 
I stood looking down at the socks which I'd hunted high and low for, and spent my hard-earned cash on, all to give Michael a more interesting answer to his daily question, and realised that in Michael's world, there are only two options: good or bad, trustworthy or undependable. There is no middle ground. 
In other words, there are no shades of grey. Everything is just black or white.