In Yeats’ apocalyptic poem The Second Coming is this cautionary line, “things fall apart / the center cannot hold / mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The context is war. In Yeats’ case, the First World War, and how men and the world are torn apart by extremes.
I have always been a huge fan of the center of things. That’s why I licked so hard on the Tootsie Pop, to get to the chocolaty middle of it all.
As a pilot, I would never fly a plane that only had one wing, whether right or left. I needed both wings to fly or else it would be a short, messy flight. But I always sat in the center, with the controls, and made the plane do what I wanted it to do.
Think of a bird. It has two wings, right and left. But the muscles that move the wings and the brain that controls them are in the center. Otherwise, every flight of every bird would be a death spiral.
Politics, as well as the natural world, can be described as a constant tug-of-war between the center and the edges. Much the same can be said of the human mind, as well. It is only in some fashion of equilibrium between the two – the center and the edges - that sanity and peace can occur.
I’ve always been a centrist politically, a moderate. I think the term du jour for that these days is “RINO," but that word really has no meaning except to those who use it to disparage others. But if RINO means an occupant of the moderate center, then I’ll accept it.
Folks like me who believe in the center get hoorahed and lambasted by those way out on the margins. We’re told “make a stand” and “pick a side."
That’s their way of saying, “C’mon out here on the extreme of things and let your hair catch fire with us. It’ll be fun!”
Political extremists would do themselves a favor if they paid attention to the pendulum swings of political reality. Think about it. For every time the bob of a pendulum touches the extreme on either side, it touches the center twice.
They might also do themselves and the rest of us a solid by cracking open a history book and learning about the Twentieth Century.
In that recent hundred year span, both extremes of political thought killed millions upon millions of people. First, the revolutions of the left in both Russia and China, then the right’s reactionary fascism of the Axis. World war was the fruit of extremism.
Nobody in their right mind would claim that either extreme political movement advanced the interests of humanity. Quite the contrary.
However, the siren song of extremism is seductive. It offers a sanctuary where the human mind can take it easy and just go with the flow of some belief system imposed by others. Extremism requires no mental labor, just blind obedience.
If a person wants to use their noggin, the center is the place to be. That’s where political dilemmas occur. That’s where you can still find a good crisis of conscience to keep the mind engaged.
Residency in the political center demands the consideration of variables and the weighing of options before choosing a course of action. It's where you can think for yourself, not just blithely accept the thought of others.
This lesson applies to both the Middle East and to Wyoming today. In fact, it applies to everywhere in between.
So yeah if you want to find me, I’ll be somewhere in the center of things here in Wyoming, reading Yeats and knowing that, when things crumble, they start crumbling at the edges first.
