Unashamedly Moderate

A couple of days ago I was in the hospital visiting a relative. I was there along with the patient and two other visitors. A lab technician came in, and he seemed like a chipper enough fellow at first. "Good morning!" he said in a loud voice. "How's everyone feeling today?"

"Fine," one of the other visitors said. "How are you?"

"Fantastic!" the technician said in that fake, cheery voice that so many hospital staff members use. He continued in that same voice: "At least, I'm doing a lot better than the 20 percent of Americans who are out of a job this Thanksgiving!"

It was a weird comment, and if it had been the ONLY weird comment he'd made, I'd have probably not given it a second thought. And at first, I thought it WAS going to be the only weird thing he said, because he followed that up with, "I'm going to have to get around you here and check his blood pressure and other readings."  It was a small room, and he slid around me and the other visitors to get over to where the machines are. He began fumbling with the equipment in the corner, and then he continued, "Yeah, the government wants you to think that unemployment is 10%, but they're just rigging the numbers to make it look that way, you know what I mean?"

I didn't know what he meant, so I answered him honestly. "No, I don't know."

His eyes got wide. "Oh yeah! The government's wanting to count all of the 16 and 17 year old who just got a summer job and are working. They want to hide the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of benefited workers who are losing their jobs every month." He got the blood pressure cuff on the patient and started taking the readings. "That's just the kind of deceit you can expect from a government, though, whose President isn't even an American citizen. Know what I mean?" He laughed a little, as if this was the most absurd and obvious fact.

"How's he doing?" I said, pointing to the patient, trying to change the subject.

"What?" the technician said. After a moment of blankly starting at me, he realized what I was referring to and said, "Oh him? He's fine. Which is better than I can say for all of these people who have to try to go through whole body scanners at the airports or else get sexually abused by some TSA agent!" He laughed again at his own joke. "Can you believe that stuff? These liberals want to take away all of our freedoms! They want to make this a socialist nation, like the USSR!"

"It's a little crowded in here," I said to the man. "I'm going to step outside and let you finish your job." It probably wasn't the bravest thing to do, to leave the other three in the room at the mercy of this guy. But I couldn't take him anymore. Eventually, one of the other visitors got tired of the man and joined me in the hallway as well, and finally the guy left. I went back inside, and everyone in the room was laughing and rolling their eyes. "I thought that guy was joking at first," I said, and everyone nodded in agreement, "but then he kept going and going."

"He was fired up," someone said.

I don't know when everyone got so angry about politics that it now bleeds over into the chit chat of hospital personnel. As someone mentioned a few minutes after the guy left, what if the patient had been a die hard liberal? It seemed like completely inappropriate behavior, but I think it's just a sign of the times. Americans have become so combative, and it seems there's no one left who is willing to compromise and work with people of different ideology. We've voted all of those people out of office, and we're left with only the hard liners who view the other side as the uninformed enemy. I guess I blame Fox News and MSNBC and Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken and anyone else who just wants to shout over top of others without listening.

I said above that no one wants to compromise anymore. I'll go a step further than that, and say that for many people, words like "compromise" and "working together" and "forging middle ground" are now dirty words, signs of weakness and lack of conviction. And it's a shame, because it's the people who ARE willing to do those things who actually get things done.

A couple of months ago on Facebook I changed my profile so that my political views are listed as "Unashamedly moderate." I added the first word because I refuse to be made to feel like a wishy washy person just because I see some sense to what the Democrats say and some sense to what the Republicans say. No one out there--and no party, either--has a monopoly on common sense. And the sooner we can all realize that, and all start working together again, the sooner we can start working on the very real problems that face this nation, and the sooner we can all stop being so hateful to people who think differently from us.