Middle Ground

Last night I returned from a four-day fishing trip to Eastern Washington.  The great thing about fishing is that it forces you to slow down and listen, at least the kind of fishing I like to do.  Of the four lakes fished, I was the only fisherman on three of them.  I don’t bring an MP3 player, there is no cell phone service at two of the lakes, and the phone is off at the other two.  I sit in an inflatable craft that requires me to wear waders and flippers to move and not become soaked.  I have enough storage in this thing to carry my lunch, a water bottle, rain jacket, sunscreen, a couple of extra spools for the fly reel, some extra leader material, and four or five small, clear plastic boxes of flies.

When not thinking of how I’m going to catch my next fish, or watching an osprey trying to catch its own fish, my mind is free to drift like the small waves being nudged along by the light breeze.  My favorite days are when my mind tends to latch on to fun topics like sex, or food, or sports, or where I’m going to fish next.  This trip’s mental theme was not so sunny, even though the weather was.  No, for some reason, politics and the dark side of human behavior kept blaring away inside my thick skull. 

It didn’t help that the camp sites at three of the four lakes were completely trashed.  At the last lake it was mostly just the usual wrappers, broken beer bottles, and cigarette butts.  There were wads of toilet paper strewn all over the bushes and ground, even though there was a public bathroom only fifty yards away.  At the most remote lake there were broken fishing rods, beer and pop cans, various packages of fishing bait and equipment, and even two abandoned pickup truck seats by the fire ring.  The worst of all was at the first lake, where there was gang graffiti on the outhouse, every sign, and on many of the big rocks.  The broken glass there was to the point that I couldn’t take two steps in any direction without stepping on it.  The worst part was the dead dog that someone had just dumped  recently.  Good thing the dog hadn’t been there long enough to really smell the place up.  The sensible side of my brain said, “Let’s just get the hell out of here!”  The stubborn side won out, with “I’m not gonna let a bunch of punk-assed gangbangers keep me from fishing!”  What kind of people go out of their way to visit a remote lake and then just trash it?

This was the back-drop of the trip’s big question, “Where have the level-headed people gone?”  I’ve been wondering that a great deal lately.  It seems like this country is becoming more and more polarized.  Even though I didn’t vote for him, I took great joy knowing that a brown-skinned man like Barack Obama could be elected as president.  I didn’t vote for President Obama because I felt he was just saying anything he could to get elected, and I felt Ralph Nader had a much better plan to get us out of Iraq and balance our national budget.  I didn’t vote for McCain because I didn’t want my tax dollars to keep supporting tax breaks for the wealthy, and I didn’t want another president who might feel it was his duty to declare war an another country full of brown-skinned people.

I was reassured in my decision to not vote republican by the absolute hate and venom unleashed at Barack Obama by all of these supposedly respectable white men and women after the past two elections.  I thought much of the blame put on President Bush was unreasonable, but it was nothing compared to what is being hurled at our current president.  Maybe we have come a long way since Martin Luther King’s days and maybe we haven’t come so far after all.

The tragic killings in Aurora, Colorado and especially at Sandy Hook elementary have me deeply worried.  The shootings themselves were, of course, tragic enough, but what really has me worried are the reactions of many people after the shootings.  An enormous segment of our society apparently could care less about all of the innocent people who were gunned down. 

What this segment of our population cares most about are guns.  It is just plain sickening to me.  Little first-graders were killed and all of the gun people lined up to either ban guns or worship guns.  Is that what it has come to?  God, I hope not.  If you own guns then you are labeled a red-neck by the left-wingers.  If you own guns but believe AR 15s and AK 47s are too excessive, then the right-wingers don’t want to believe you exist and call you a liar and a liberal.  Yes, I do own some guns.  Yes, I do hunt with these guns.  So what?  The lives of those poor little kids and their families is and always will be more important than your damn guns or the rights of Remington, Ruger, or Browning to sell all of weapon and ammunition that they can.  And no, I don’t think that those of us who do own firearms should be penalized by the actions of the criminally insane.  Both sides seemed to completely lose sight of the human element.  Those victims and their families deserve better.

Is affordable health care for everyone in this country really a bad thing?  Can the greatest economic power on the planet afford to make sure we all can be treated both physically and mentally?  Or should adequate health care be reserved for only a certain, privileged segment of our country?   Follow the money.  Where are your priorities?

Are we as a country really this polarized?  I hope not.  But the politicians and those who back them seem to think so.  What happened to those of us in the middle?  Are we being drowned out or are we being lazy enough to let ourselves get drowned out?  I would like to think our country has not been reduced to the Liberals vs. the Teabaggers.  I’d like to think most of us are still using our own heads and not letting the extremists on either end do our thinking for us.