We are a nation facing an obesity problem, yet finding our middle seems beyond us. The one-sided forces of nationalism and religion are behind most of the turmoil and killing in the Middle East, but finding a balance point, a middle ground, seems almost impossible. In my dealings with the religious right, I find we have many similar concerns, but emotional issues such as gay marriage and flag burning occupy such enormous positions for them that there seems no way around them. They trigger responses that do not allow for a middle ground. As one who grew up when it was perfectly acceptable to call homosexuals fags, queers, fairies, and other such cruel terms, when mistreatment of them (physical or emotional) was also acceptable, it is impossible for me to think of their lifestyle as a choice. I think we are just wired differently. Also, I doubt that homosexuals will reproduce fast enough to become a major problem to the world. Global warming, on the other hand, threatens more than our lifestyles, it threatens our species, ours and others as well. On this I find much agreement, but not nearly enough interest.

Our leaders have focused on free elections, equating them with democracy, but the results so far have shown remarkably little interest in self-government, at least in the Middle East. The big winners in those elections have been theocrats, Imams making the decisions for everyone else—hardly a democratic society. In the developing nations of our own hemisphere, the movement has been toward the left, again with powerful leaders taking over. The average person continues to be guided by the persuaders in power, and nationalism, as with our neighbors to the east, continues as a motivating factor for our neighbors to the south.

The only real democracy in the Middle East is Israel, where its citizens have been influenced by generations in Europe. Most of the developing countries we are dealing with have had no such experience. They tend to go with the known, the familiar, rather than risking the responsibility of democracy. Yet, even in Israel religion and nationalism pull most of the strings.

Our situation is somewhat different. We are moving from a truly democratic society of long standing toward a theocracy. We have lost most of our friends and thousands of our youth because of cowboy diplomacy—another way of saying belligerent nationalism. The findings of science continue to be questioned by the religious right and the merely greedy refuse to look much beyond their own life span. Under such conditions, finding a middle ground is well nigh impossible.

Iraq is in a state of civil war, a war that bears little resemblance to our Civil War because the combatants do not wear uniforms and march into battle, they simply take turns executing each other. They may well find themselves killing relatives and friends, but otherwise there is little outward resemblance to our established picture of civil war.

Israel's response to Hezbollah has moved world attention away from Iraq for the moment, but the problems haven't gone away, they've just grown more complicated. At home and abroad we find people more willing to fight than to talk. We have systems of communication enormously more convenient than ever before in the history of mankind, yet we can not talk our way out of a fight. If there is a middle ground, few are interested in finding it, and there is a middle ground in almost every argument, someone just has to look for it. Our theme song would seem to be Billie Holiday's "All, or Nothing at All." It wasn't a sad song in its day, but you have to be my age to remember it. That's sad enough.

Posted by Wes Randolph   |   Sunday, July 16, 2006