The Militant Moderate

Some thirty years ago the Militant Moderate made a speech to a group of two or three hundred college freshmen.  The title has long been forgotten, but one major point within the theme of the speech was that a person is defined as much by what he is against as that which he favors.  Certainly, it is important that an individual choose carefully those ideas and causes he/she will support and which will be given time and energy.  But in truly defining oneself as a person, it is also important to clearly delineate those conditions, actions, or events which one opposes with sincerity and often great animus.  

Some things bother the Militant Moderate.  

One of the foremost of these is injustice, or phrased another way, “Man’s inhumanity to man.”  

About a year ago the Militant Moderate was having a customary coffee at McDonald’s with Dr. Joe Struckle, retired president of Northwestern Oklahoma State University and in earlier years a graduate student, faculty member, and administrator under his tutelage.  An older lady came by our table to thank the two of us for championing reforms in the Oklahoma Teacher Retirement System which would bring improved benefits and insurance to elderly retirees.  She told us of her difficulties in making ends meet and buying her prescriptions.  She detailed how it was necessary to cut some pills in half and to skip days with others to get through the month on her retirement benefits.  

This bothered Dr. Struckle.  It also bothered the Militant Moderate.  Whenever we become discouraged in our efforts to improve that retirement system through political action, we think back of this lady.  She and others like her need champions.  These conditions should indeed bother people.  There is an injustice in such cases that cries out for righting.  People in positions of power in this state and in this nation need to be sensitive to the lives of Americans who must depend upon them.  

In a related incident, the MM’s wife recently had an experience with a lady in a service occupation that has bothered the two of us.  The lady confided in her that she was an ex-convict, having served two years in prison for a second DUI offense.  She was a mother and grandmother, who had a short period of personal trauma in her life worsened by alcohol.  Strangely enough, according to her story, she had actually parked her car to avoid driving but was found “in control,” as the law says.  (The MM recalls that a prominent senator was once arrested on that charge while sleeping in the back seat of his car in a parking lot.)  This lady is an independent worker at a modest income, cannot afford health insurance, and was working in arthritic pain because she was saving her last two celebrex pills for the hardest days of the week coming up.  

Presuming that her account has a modicum of validity, and it rings true, then this lady has not had a fair shake in life.  Her condition of personal hardship cries out for help from the rest of us.  There is too much callousness toward the less fortunate.  The Militant Moderate is bothered by such human conditions all around.  

Hearing a TV report on the huge number of new laws that in the making in the legislature, the MM’s wife raised the pertinent question, “Don’t we have enough already?”  Considering the fact that many of those bills involve raising misdemeanors to felonies, and adding penalties and longer prison terms for offenses, then the question is really pertinent.  For instance, we are now going to make a young grocery clerk into a felon for, purposely or inadvertently, selling beer to another young person.  With one of the highest incarceration rate in the country, and with a constantly increasing cost of prisons in taxpayer money and lost human lives and productivity, it seems to the Militant Moderate that we are ignorantly persistent in heading in the wrong direction.  We should be looking for alternatives to incarceration, not for more ways to put people behind bars.  

It bothers the Militant Moderate that so many seem determined to make life harder for others through the legal system.  It bothers him also that so few seem to be sensitive to human conditions and hardships around them.  

Too few are bothered about the right things these days.  Too many are bothered by “hot button” issues such as abortion, gay marriage, tort reform, TABOR, prayer in schools, estate taxes, and posting the commandments.  Too few are bothered by human suffering, the plight of widows and orphans, rates of incarceration, health care for the sick and the elderly, the homelessness of the mentally ill, or the bare existence of life for the poor.  

Indeed, the things which bother us define the person that we are.  


  Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate