Remember what I was saying last week, about having little hope about my divided country being put back together?
It seems like every day I get more and more discouraged.
There have always been radicals on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Quite frankly, extreme radicalism has always frightened me.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m just not seeing it, but it feels like the bottom is falling out from underneath the middle ground.
I’ve always considered myself a middle-of-the-road kinda gal…I’ve always seen the value of cooperation. No, we’re not going to agree on everything, but in order for progress to be made, we need to find the middle, seek the happy medium, encourage cooperation between politicians on both sides of the divide.
Lately, though, my reaction to what I perceive as excessive extremism from the right is a shift further left.
As evidence, I give you these two pieces which are making the rounds on various blogs.
The former is a bitter, angry diatribe expressing frustration over Kerry’s loss. The latter suggests that the red states kick out the blue states. I don’t see anyone taking “Fuck the South” too terribly seriously. I do, however, fear that Thompson’s “Modest Proposal” might be.
The further question on that is, did he mean it to be? I’m not sure. I forwarded the link to R, and he responded with the question “do you think it’s possible that this is a very clever liberal wakeup call?”
Hmm. Good question. I don’t know what the answer is.
Back to the point I was originally trying to make…my biggest fear is that this loss of the middle, this ever-growing extremism on either side, could be permanently damaging.
And Electablog agrees with me:
We expect extremism from the valleys of deep red and deep blue. We also expect that extremism to be scorned by the rest of us who supposedly live along the purple mountains of moderate majesty. We got a lot of extremism. We didn’t get much scorn…
The medium, we are told, is the message. Well, in American politics, for most of us, the message should be medium. But it’s not. And the American middle sold its own soul for the privilege of being silent in an anything to win era. The sane center is shrinking while the margins are just a little less marginalized.