Enough! Yet another pundit has written that now, now the middle-of-the-roaders will have to take a side.
Please get this through your head: we have taken a side. We did it a long time ago. We're centrists -- that's our side. We are not going to sell out to the wingnuts at either extreme. Neither of those sides represents us.
Centrism is not apathy or wishy-washyness. It's a principled insistence on listening to all concerns and trying to synthesize the best solution from them. It's a thoughtful stand that values understanding over emotion and insists on looking at all the evidence, not just the bits that support one's own prejudices.
Centrists, we've been slack, in allowing extremists to impose false dichotomies on public discourse. Choosing between two wrong notions yields a wrong choice. It's time, past time, to show them how firm we can be. Time to calmly insist, and never stop insisting, that there are issues on which compromise is the best course, that all citizens are equally important, and that a valid concern is valid even if one doesn't like its import. And to say it loudly enough that they can hear us.
