Besieged from left and right

ONE OF THE best moments in modern American movie history is that scene from “Network” where Peter Finch’s character, an aging news anchor, goes to the window and yells, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Like almost every American, hardly a day goes by when I don’t want to re-create Finch’s scene.

Sometimes the absurdity of today’s society just makes you want to scream.

You can’t turn on a TV news broadcast or pick up a newspaper these days without finding a story about the “far right,” the staunch conservatives, attacking the “far left,” the wild liberals.

It is crazy! Liberals hate conservatives and conservatives hate liberals. Democrats hate Republicans and vice versa.

Hey! Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute! Aren’t we all Americans? Don’t we share some of the same ideals? Why do we continue to beat up on each other?

The truth is that we all don’t hate each other. The far right may hate the far left and vice versa, but these people are in the minority.

In between these crazy groups that yell and scream at each other are a host of normal people who just want to live and let live.

They don’t want to be pushed around by the right and they don’t want to be pushed around by the left. They just want to be left alone.

I pride myself that I fall into that middle group. We are the “silent majority” and we don’t want to be pushed off the deep end in either direction.

And, yes, we are just about ready to open the windows and scream, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore!”

We are tired of being jerked around by groups of crazies with agendas that always seem to find a bully pulpit somewhere.

We are tired of somebody always trying to save us from something. Maybe we don’t want to be saved. Maybe we just want to be left alone.

We don’t want the far right telling us what church to attend or the far left telling us what we should or should not eat.

We don’t want to be told that we are bad people because we don’t subscribe to the conservatism of the far right or that we are ignorant people because we don’t heed all the advice of the far left.

Maybe we are bad and maybe we are ignorant. Then again, maybe bad and ignorant are just the perceptions of narrow-minded people.

If you look back at our history, social and political revolutions seem to occur about once every couple of generations and I think we are about due one.

Maybe last week’s Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election was the first skirmish in that battle of change.

Voters there as much as said that they were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take all the bickering anymore, that they were tired of Democrats and Republicans fighting like cats and dogs.

I’m not a Republican and I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a liberal and I’m not a conservative. And I don’t want either group trying to save me from the other.

I am a middle-class American and I’ll make up my own mind what I want to be saved from, thank you very much.

Middle-class Americans are the fabric of this country and we are tired of being told what we should or should not do and who we should or should not follow.

We are tired of the far right and we are tired of the far left. They can live their lives however they choose, but don’t try to make us do the same.

And if the far right and the far left fall off their respective cliffs, we won’t shed a tear.

We are that fed up!

Donnie Johnston:

djohnston@freelancestar.com

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