Meet Me In The Middle

They say you’re born a Democrat and die a Republican, so perhaps it tracks that at 40 I’ve landed in the center as a moderate.

It’s easy to be righteous when you’re young. Easy to believe that whatever sounds humane must also be right. Youth has the luxury of moral absolutism because it hasn’t yet collided with tradeoffs. Then you live a little. You build things. You break things. You start to see that policy, like life, is complicated — not because people are evil, but because incentives, circumstances, and human nature are.

There are no sober, one-size-fits-all solutions. Only vantage points. And like in business and love, every win requires a loss. The real question isn’t whether someone pays the price — it’s who we’re most comfortable asking to lose. That’s where our reptilian brains kick in: my values or yours, and I’d rather protect mine than understand yours.

Religion often overplays its hand in these debates. As an atheist, any argument rooted primarily in faith collapses immediately for me. That doesn’t mean I reject morality — it means I insist it be grounded in humanity and logic. And before I sound like an enlightened tree hugger, I also recognize that humans are not saints-in-waiting. We are layered with love, generosity, greed, jealousy, fear. These traits are primitive, enduring, and universal. We evolve socially, not biologically.

What saddens me most is how completely our two-party system has stripped us of the ability to see disagreement as human. I’ve lost good friendships with good people over dissent. I’ve been deemed morally defective for refusing to align perfectly with someone else’s worldview. When disagreement becomes grounds for exile, we’re no longer debating policy — we’re enforcing ideology.

My core belief is simple: society has a baseline obligation to protect the vulnerable — minorities, women, children, the elderly, the disabled and those structurally disadvantaged by poverty, health, or circumstance. No one should be excluded from safety, opportunity or economic mobility. But protection, opportunity and mobility is not unconditional. No circumstance should be weaponized or used to excuse behavior that harms others — violence, theft, chronic lawlessness , corruption — it is there that the moral contract breaks.

I will extend respect, concern, and political consideration in proportion to the respect someone shows for others — and for themselves.

My frustration with the far left isn’t its values; it’s its posture. A moral high ground that refuses to acknowledge consequences is not moral at all. I live in California. I have lived the most progressive experiment in the country, not in theory but in practice. And what I see is not compassion scaling — it’s dysfunction institutionalized. Good intentions untethered from reality don’t remain virtuous; they become destructive. And don’t get me started on the right’s failures — which isn’t a lack of values either, but a selective application of them — invoking responsibility until it becomes inconvenient, and freedom until it belongs to someone they don’t agree with.

Progress doesn’t require purity. It requires honesty. And adulthood — politically and otherwise — means accepting that caring deeply doesn’t absolve us of tolerance or critical thinking. The hard middle is where ideas untether from party allegiance and are forced to bear weight from both sides of the political spectrum.