Written by Don Washington   

I am an American moderate. I exist dead center in what the majority of Americans want on every major issue facing the country and no one speaks for me or to me. I am an American moderate and everyday I see my country descending into anarchy and evil. Everyday the media I depend on to help me be an informed citizen capable of relating to and holding government officials accountable accede to radical, even Noe-Confederate forces as if they are legitimate participants in political arena. I am an American moderate. I believe that it should be true that Don Washington and Lloyd Blankfein are both citizens who are truly political equals in the public square because we each have one vote and are each bound by the same laws but we aren't. He engaged in a criminal conspiracy to steal billions and continues to do so not only without penalty but now with both impunity, rewards and perverse incentives to do more of the same.

I am an American moderate and like the vast majority of Americans I want universal single-payer healthcare, I want us to stop occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and I don't believe in eternal war. I am a moderate American and I know that church and state do not mix, faith-based government initiatives should not exist. I am a moderate American and everything I've just said is supported by more than 70% of all Americans and no one hears my voice. I am shouting into the landscape of a nation that is descending into it's oblivion as its leaders fiddle, cut and outsource away its soul.

I am an American moderate and the people who have been identified as moderate by the media are anything but moderate. Thomas Friedman is no moderate. His free market ideas come from Milton Friedman and end in the bloodshed and violence that are the hallmarks of disaster capitalism at its worst. He is an advocate of Hobbes not Jefferson. He is an acolyte of plutocracy not democracy and he is not a moderate. A moderate knows in their bones that Karl Popper was right, there are some worldviews that are a danger to the world having a view. Endless war, profiting from an endless war, unregulated markets and the poisons they produce demonstrate this.

I am a moderate American and David Gregory does not speak for me. He wants an end to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and he either doesn't know how they work and impact the budget or he is intentionally lying about how they work. More than 60% of us know we want these programs and even want them expanded. In fact the more we know about how the budget actually works the more we are wont to want steps to be taken to redistribute wealth to shatter the economic inequality that defines our society and contend with the corporate forces that are tearing our country apart. I am a moderate American and one of those forces turns out to be David Gregory.

I am a moderate American and I believe in the rule of law. I do not support the PATRIOT ACT. Like over 60% of us I do not believe that the government should be violating my papers, person and communications without cause. I am a moderate American and I believe that freedom of religion is also freedom from religion. I don't object to prayer but to see it elevated in the political sphere sets my teeth on edge because I am a moderate and whatever religion is it is not moderate. It demands obedience, faithfulness and a belief in things that cannot be proven. As a moderate I know that once religion enters the public square it is both jealous and zealous... just like its God. I have a faith but it is mine and it does not belong in the cathedral of the civic social contract that is America. In the latest poll only Tea Party members score lower than Christian fundamentalists in terms of negative recognition. Moderation knows fanaticism when we see it but who does our immoderate media cover? Eighty-thousand moderate teachers who want to paid a living wage descend on the capital and it would take one of them committing human sacrifice to get coverage. Two hundred Tea Party activists appeared a few blocks away from the White House and three helicopters, followed by satellite trucks mentioned them. It appears that the media is not moderate either.

I am a moderate American and as a moderate I am appalled. I am appalled that there are no consequences for legalizing torture and creating a set of laws that make it legal to secretly abduct, detain and torture American citizens with secret evidence and without due process while our President looks forward and not back. I am a moderate American and I am enraged that the answer to the criminal conspiracy that is our financial sector is to allow them to get larger, enact no meaningful reform and to prosecute none of them. I am a moderate American and I am confused and saddened that there is no political will to enact the economic solutions we already know will create employment and address the economic pit we are sliding into. Keynes was right and no amount of right-wing spin changes the fact that following their prescriptions have led us here and here is past the edge of disaster. In a plutocracy or a kleptocracy rational thought and solutions are ignored in favor of crony capitalism or worse.

I am a moderate American and it is not my fault that perhaps this column doesn't make me sound that way but moderate is what I am. Everything I've said is supported by between sixty to seventy percent of Americans... the rest of the moderates. I am a moderate American and it is not my fault that while I was out being moderate torture became a debatable quality for the immoderate mainstream media and not the social evil that it is. I am an American moderate and I would like someone, somewhere to stop mainstreaming secessionist governors, Christian religious zealots, free market fundamentalists, social Darwinist philosophers, plutocratic thought memes, the privatization of public resources and hate, distrust and fear of the government we vote for and have to have work on our behalf.

I am an American moderate and I don't want the country back. I just want the immoderate media to function so that we moderate citizens can have enough information to have our moderate views begin to define both debates and reality. I don't want anything more than the possibility that some day our political debate will not start to the far right of center and wander all the way over to the radical right as if that is the ground We the People sprang from because it isn't and as a moderate I'd just like the world to reflect a more moderate point of view.