A Must-Read And Share:

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SydneyMichalski🌿NatureMoments

🌿This note has struck a chord and gotten some attention, so I just wanted to say that anyone who wants to share from this note, please feel free, in any way you like :)🌿

Last week, I wrote to my Senator, Angus King, asking him to please focus on three priorities in the new year: 1) Stop foreign invasions 2) Release the Epstein files 3) Restore ACA subsidies.

Senator King wrote me back, because he’s actually really good about answering constituent correspondence. And one of the things he said is that he is increasingly concerned with the “growing gulf between the left and right and the shrinking middle.”

I see this argument a lot, actually, from all these avowed “centrists.” And I will tell you, it pisses me off. It’s an entire mischaracterization of this moment in history.

This is what I wrote:

Senator King,

Thank for your recent response. One of the concerns that you expressed was regarding the “growing gulf between the left and right and the shrinking middle.”

I want to re-frame this, because it’s a mischaracterization.

When we talk about political ideology, the center of the spectrum in the United States is meant to be the Constitution and the rule of law. That is the standard, the baseline, the bare minimum of agreement against which the full right-to-left spectrum of policy negotiations and compromises must ultimately be tested. (emphasis mine)

The gulf that has developed today is not about polarization. The left and right are not migrating further apart. The right has launched off the edge of the chart into violent authoritarianism. There is no corresponding leftward lurch towards social revolution.

The overwhelming and growing public reaction, these thousands and millions of protestors flooding the phones and taking to the streets to demand that the law and the Constitution be followed – we ARE the center!

I tried to explain this to Congressman Jared Golden, too. He really, really wants me to be a far-left activist extremist. But I’m just a wife and a mom living in a cabin in the Maine woods. We chop firewood for heat, we harvest maple syrup tree by tree, our kids work on local shellfish farms. We are deeply ordinary.

But our most basic and fundamental civil rights and liberties are increasingly under assault. If an ICE agent doesn’t like the way I follow their instructions, they will shoot me in the face, call me a f****** b****, and the President will say that according to his own morality in his own mind, that was legal and I deserved it.

As I asked Jared months ago, just how far right do you have to travel to start believing that asking elected officials to follow the Constitution and the rule of law is Progressive Activism?

We are not far left extremists becoming increasingly polarized. We are masses of Americans asking for adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law. We are asking for the bare minimum.

The center is not supposed to be negotiated ever rightward into fascist dictatorship. The center is supposed to be uncompromisingly anchored in the Constitution and the rule of law. This is supposed to be the line of absolute principle.

That is why I am disappointed every single time you vote with the regime. It’s not because I’m polarized. It’s because you’re negotiating with people who don’t believe in the center at all. You are negotiating with terrorists.

What you are witnessing today is not a shrinking middle. The center is actually growing in a rising tide. Millions of Americans are suddenly deadly aware that every Constitutional right that they thought was firmly enshrined is threatened by one single group of far-right, power-hungry, violent rogue extremists.

So if the center is really what you stand for, I have good news for you. Now is your time! The center is the largest it has ever been! Millions of dead-center Americans are as awake, as alert, as active as they have been in a generation. We are demanding the absolute center of political ideologies, and the bare minimum of governance – the restoration of Constitutional democracy. So join us! But understand this about the center. It is not the place for compromise.

Snip-please go read the rest at Annie’s (I didn’t leave a lot out here, so that won’t take long;) and then quickly but thoughtfully join people who are working hard to retain our democracy, and fix the holes. Not doing anything is really simply asking for these very bad things to continue, and history has shown how that ends. Thank you!