Dear Middle:
In politics, there are the far right and the far left. Those two groups seem to be having all the fun and getting all the attention.
Then there are all of you. You know who you are.
You may be a Democrat, or you may be a Republican. But when you read the OpEd pages of your newspaper, you are not seeing views that sync up with yours.
You may be Black. You may be White. Maybe you’re Brown like me. But you don’t believe your skin color (or gender) determines your political affiliation. And you are intellectually honest about illegal vs. legal immigration.
Maybe you’re a Christian who enjoys wishing your Jewish friends a Happy Hanukkah or a Jew who isn’t offended when people say, “Merry Christmas.”
You may be pro-life. You may be pro-choice. But you’ve never attended a march.
You have learned about American history — the good, the bad, and the ugly. And you also want to celebrate our country’s goodness, progress, freedom, and opportunity.
Perhaps you’ve heard the chants of, “Silence is violence!” And your reaction is, “I’m just not a politically active person. And that makes me violent? Really?!”
You may like the idea of green energy but realize that there is a process to getting there that involves fossil fuels and maybe even (gasp) nuclear energy along the way.
And while some of your neighbors have signs in their front yards that read, “In Fauci We Trust,” you believe that a team of rivals is better suited than one individual to respond to a pandemic.
You live in the vast swath of “The Middle,” a place where you may lean right or left, but politics is not your religion.
The Middle is like flyover country: It’s not New York or Washington, DC, and it’s not California or the Pacific Northwest.
The Middle is the massive swath of land in between, which the coastal elites view as uninteresting. Dull. Not so worldly. Not so enlightened.
Having grown up in the Los Angeles area, gone to college at UC Berkeley, earned a masters degree at USC, worked as an intern in Washington, DC, and spent my journalism career with New York-based mainstream media outlets, I have firsthand experience with both coasts.
Over the past thirty years, I’ve lived in Charlotte, North Carolina; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Estero, Florida; and spent my career traveling the country.
I’ve met so many of you in the Middle. I’ve talked with people of all political stripes. I’ve appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight AND The View. Talk about whiplash.
But I LIVE in the Middle with all of you. It’s not a place but a state of mind. And I am watching as people — and Big Tech — try to silence us and pretend we don’t matter.
If you don’t want CRT taught to your kids, you are called racist.
If you don’t want your first-grader taught about sex, you’re anti-LGBTQ.
If you’re pro-life, you are anti-woman (even if you ARE a woman).
You can’t win.
Wait…
Yes, you can.
Because there are more of us in the Middle than there are at the edges. And our most powerful sound is produced not through a megaphone or a tweet — but in the privacy of the ballot box.
And while we are all skeptical about whom we can trust these days — from politicians to the clergy; from the entertainment industry to academia; from Nike to Disney; from the Department of Justice to the Department of Defense…
We can still vote.
And that is something the rest of the world envies.
So, dear Middle, don’t take that lightly. Know that you matter.
And, in the meantime, don’t be afraid to speak out. There is safety in numbers. Let’s form a coalition of courage and be brave together. And let’s NOT apologize.
Otherwise, as a wise woman once told me, “The goons will win.”
And we can’t have that.