Safety in the Middle of the Road

In this month’s installment of These Ozarks Hills, Marideth Sisco discusses what it means to be a “rabid moderate.”

This is Marideth Sisco for These Ozarks Hills. Last week, a friend of mine asked if I could fill in for a fellow who had been in an accident. He was to be the moderator at a panel discussion on health care reform. My first question was "Why Me?" Of course, given my recent experience when I was immersed in the health care system, I thought maybe that's why they wanted me. But no."Well," she said, "They wanted someone who could be neutral."Neutral? I thought. I'm the most opinionated person I know. I thought about what she said all day, but at the end of it I had to confess, most of my opinions are, well, moderate.

I've never seen the sense in going way out in left field, or the other direction, either, just to be the way-outest of the way out. In fact, I'm usually the first to start looking for a compromise when people around me are at odds. Without a way to find common ground, arguments can turn into grudges and grudges into feuds, and before you know it, someone has done or said something that someone else finds unforgivable. And then it's war. Near and far, we've certainly seen that happen often enough to recognize it.

I had that whole phenomenon explained to me once by a Native American friend of mine down south, a Shawnee man who startled me when he expressed this notion. "Just about all the troubles of the world can be traced back," he said, "to men not letting the women be in charge." I asked him to explain, thinking maybe I misunderstood him. "Men only think in straight lines, while women can think in circles," he said "Women think about before and after, and yesterday and tomorrow, and the old people and the babies and what they need and what you have to be prepared for and how to get everybody fed. They can look all the way around a situation." He shook his head. "Men don't do that. They are like little children all their lives. They poke the guy in front of them and kick the guy in back. They're so wrapped up in ego and one-upmanship that left to themselves they'll sooner or later end up in a fight, and that leads to murder and war and then the world just goes to hell. I had to admit, when I thought about it , that he was making a whole lot of sense. You know, if a person can only think in straight lines, when they get crossways with one another, there's no way to fix it unless someone can help them see it another way.

He also said this, that "Men know how to do all kinds of things, but they don't know what to do, and if there's not a woman there to help them work out what to do, then it's all one-upmanship and war. "I thought about that all day too.

Well. The panel did fine, and probably would have done just as well without me. Moderator I was, but no moderation was needed. Everyone was cordial, answered all the questions intelligently, and were civil to each other, even when they had to agree to disagree. But right in the middle of things, when I had nothing to do and was bouncing things around in my head over this notion of "Moderator," I remembered a conversation I'd had years back with a colleague who quizzed me about my politics. I had just come from covering a meeting where the proponents of the left side and the right side had almost come to blows because the other side just wouldn't see it their way. I was disgusted with the whole pack of 'em. Have you ever noticed that when you put together the people who are the most vocal and rabid representatives of the farthest left and farthest right, you can't hardly tell them apart? They're alike enough to be kinfolks, each one trying to prove who can throw the biggest fit? Well, right then I announced my political preference in no uncertain terms. "I'm a rabid moderate," I said. Well, I have to admit I haven't changed as I've gotten older. I'm still focused on the middle path. And I've discovered something along the way. If you can manage to stay exactly on the white line in the middle, you can avoid most of the traffic. This is Marideth Sisco, somewhere in the middle of the road, in These Ozarks Hills.