CARLTON FLETCHER: Answer to America’s woes in the middle

They’ve all come to look for America.

— Paul Simon

If you find yourself listening to — and, heaven forbid, agreeing with — the rhetoric of the individuals who represent the extremes of both sides of any issue — the ones I like to think of as the “lunatic fringe” — you may want to re-evaluate.

What started as more of a national/international phenomenon, the art of painting doomsday or pie-in-the-sky scenarios, has filtered its way down to the local level, thanks primarily to social media. Unfortunately, our country — in particular the generations that came of age during the technological revolution that have made the cellphone pretty much a detachable organ — has devolved to the point that it cares way less about fact or fiction, more about the ravings of the extremes.

That’s how our country has seen a frightening re-emergence of old hate groups like the KKK, skinheads and Nazis and the emergence of new hate groups like the Antifa movement, whose puzzling motto is peace through violent confrontation. (Maybe they’re a kindler, gentler KKK … a politically correct skinhead organization?)

Because of the division in this country — and let’s not mince words here, that division started with greedy and dispicable politicians who put special interest groups that gave them boatloads of money ahead of the people they were elected to represent — seemingly rational individuals are digging their heels in the sand and following the lead of those who espouse oftentimes confrontational and wrong-headed ideologies.

Of course, when people of influence — say the president of the country, for instance — try to downplay the repugnance of hate groups by using the old playground excuse “Well, he did it, too!” you end up with those same seemingly rational people defending the actions of the KKK, skinheads, Nazis and … well, whatever you call an Antifa-er.

And the gaping divides that have sprung up in the country — the racial, gender, socio-economic, generational, political gaps — become chasms, threatening the very foundation of the wealthiest country in the history of ever.

You have people who want to “take this country back to its glory days” … which might be an ideal everyone could agree on if those “glory days” didn’t include a large part of the population being used as product, enslaved to serve at the whim of a wealthy ruling class. Would you consider yourself living the high life if you were legally counted as three-fifths of a person and risked arrest if you used public facilities that weren’t designated specifically for you because of your skin color?

There are others, younger radicals, typically, who demand that every institution that is part of past generations be blown up and recreated in their idyllic vision. These are individuals who prefer anarchy and chaos because those extremes are more suited to their live-on-the-edge way of life.

And somewhere, caught up in the middle of all this mess, are the overwhelming majority of people who are not members or supporters of either extreme. They are, it seems unfortunate, the silent majority. They watch with varying levels of horror, disgust, trepidation — with, in the words of the great “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, “fear and loathing” — and wonder where this great experiment that was America went wrong.

They worry about the soul of a country that at one time was the ideal, the envy of every other nation in existence, and they spend more time than they’d like concerned about their children’s and their grandchildren’s future. Such is the influence of the lunatic fringe.

Some extremists say there’s no way to fix what’s broken in America without another civil war or some other such kind of calamity. Hell, they may be right. But I can’t help believing that if that silent majority that resides in the moderate middle — with leanings in one direction or another — would exert its power — at the ballot box, in particular, but also in denouncing the actions of both extremes — there could be a new and improved America.

This new America could be one that reinstates the ideals that made the country great, but it could also be one that bears out the ideal that was intended as a guideline for this democracy: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men were created equal. Now that’s a radical idea we all could live with.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.