I Am the Middle Ground

Someone told me the other day, "You need to come to a middle a ground," in relation to my recent political posts and thoughts. I need to come to a middle ground. Hmm...
Actually, I've been told similar things by a lot of Trump supporters, that I am not being tolerant of them and their positions. To that, I say that it is not actually okay to be tolerant of other people's intolerance, that's equivalent to saying that it's okay for the guy down the street to beat his children because it's none of your business what goes on in his house. However, that's not exactly legally true, as you might be accountable if you know there is child abuse going on and didn't do anything about it. Basically, though, this:
Being tolerant of other people's racism is not being tolerant of alternate worldviews; it's participating in racism. In other words, it doesn't make you tolerant, it makes you racist.

Just like not reporting known child abuse can make you accountable for that crime even though you had nothing physically to do with it.
Funny how that works, isn't it? (Yes, for the impaired of you out there, that's sarcasm.)

As for me needing to find a middle ground, let's look at that:

Our nation was founded on the stated belief that "all men are created equal." That was our stated Declaration and reason for our Revolution. So that creates for us a Middle Ground that looks something like this:

(L=liberal, C=conservative)

Of course, that's not how we actually started out. It was a good ideal, but our nation started with a "small" problem that the Founding Fathers were unable to deal with. As such, the wheel looked like this:

It took about 80 years for the social liberals in the government to turn the wheel. And a war. That led us to this:

That lasted through the 1960s, when social liberals, again, managed to turn the wheel to something like the first image:

Of course, that didn't happen without a lot of... turbulence..., to put it lightly. And social conservatives have been pushing back against it ever since. In fact, they have been pushing back against everything that social liberals have done going back to FDR. Newt Gingrich sort of led the charge in the 80s, but it really picked up in the 90s as a response to Bill Clinton's Presidency. What we have, now, is something that looks more like this:

Now, this is where the racism comes in with Trump and those who voted for him. If Trump and his cohorts (people like Steve Bannon) get their way, they will turn the wheel back to the pre-60s wheel with the C at the top. It's already going that way with laws being passed in some states (like North Carolina) which disenfranchise African Americans. Trump supporters, whether they "feel" racist or not, are actively participating in putting in place people who want to enact policies to bring this about:

So... It doesn't matter how you feel about yourself and whether you feel like you're racist or not -- even people like Steve Bannon, David Duke, and Richard Spencer claim not to be racist -- it matters what actions you take. Supporting Trump means you support a racist agenda, an agenda which promotes white supremacy, and that puts you in the racist camp, or Team Racism. And I wouldn't put it past Bannon and friends to want to flip the dial back upside down all together.

The point, though, is this:

In a world where we consider slavery to be wrong and equality to be right, 

this world:

Then I am the middle ground. The problem is that those on the Right, conservatives and fundamentalists of whatever sorts, have pushed their bar so far to the right...

(and in a world where white cops can routinely shoot unarmed black men and not suffer any consequences for it, we are certainly far, far into the Racial Inequality section of the Social Justice Wheel)

They have pushed it so far to the right that I now seem to be standing on the far left. To them. Because I haven't moved. I'm still standing in the same place where I believe in equality for all men. All people.

People, this is where we make our stand, a stand for equality. A stand for "all men are created equal." If we allow the Trumps and Bannons and Farages to spin the wheel back around so that the Conservatives are in ascendance, it will likely take decades to move it back to a place where equality for all is again a goal. We can't let that happen.

This is a time for standing up for what is right, not look to meet conservatives somewhere in the middle, because in the middle is already too far from equality. A Trump presidency is wrong, not because he's a Republican (he's not), but because he and his ilk represent and perpetuate an evil on the world, and we can't step aside and let that happen in the name of "finding the middle ground."

We are the middle ground, and we need to claim it and hold fast to it. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

__________

Additional Note:

You may have noticed that there is nothing on the liberal side of my Social Justice Wheel:

That's because we've never been there, so I'm not really sure what's over there. I think conservatives have the irrational fear that it's some form of socialism or communism (even though they really have no idea what those terms actually mean), the ultimate evil to many, many conservatives. [I got called a communist recently on FB for posting a quote from Abraham Lincoln about racial equality.] However, if I had to guess, I would guess it would be something like this:

Clearly, we are nowhere near to approaching that! And it may be the thing that social conservatives fear the most. I mean, if we let women be equal to men, we might have to admit that they sometimes ought to be in charge.