This is a tale of some wisdom I gained from two drunk men, one from a game and one from real life:
Video Drunken Man is an android app about a poor schmoe who is in the doghouse with his wife because he went on a bender. To win back her good graces, he must go back out in his drunken state to buy her a gift. Your job as the player is to keep Drunken Man standing as long as possible by tilting your phone to the left and to the right as he teeters one way or the other.
When I first played the game, my Drunken Man teetered wildly to the left, then wildly to the right and fell over after only walking a few yards. As I got better at the game, I found that I could keep him in the middle by anticipating which way he would lean and making very small, gentle corrections so he could maintain his balance. Suddenly I had him going 30 or 40 yards.
But no matter how hard I tried, I could not keep him balanced in the middle very long with this approach. Once he started tilting to the right, it became hard to keep him in the center with just small corrections. There was this rightward lean, and my slight tilts of the phone to the left were of almost no value. Drunken Man just kept leaning more and more to the right until he would fall over into a pile of garbage cans.
So I found that the better approach was to keep Drunken Man in the center as long as I could with a gentle tilt to the left or right as needed, but when he started doing that rightward creep and I couldn’t nudge him out of it, I would tilt hard to the left and then slowly bring Drunken Man back to center. Now I was getting 70 to 80 yards.
I could not stay in the Center without from time to time making a hard move to the Left. This was my learning from Video Drunken Man.
What I learned from Real Drunken Man on the other side of the cloud.
I’ve never really known if being a Moderate for me was a political stance or a personality flaw.
The first time I knew for certain I was a Moderate was in college. I had attended a protest. My house mate said, “Hey, there’s a protest tonight, want to come?” I said, “Sure.” Didn’t have a clue what it was about. Didn’t think to ask. College. Enough said, right!
There was a rally and then a group said that they were going to squat in an abandoned house owned by the University. Put something that was absentee-owned and abandoned to use for the homeless. “Take the house,” they chanted. In my college mind, it seemed vaguely illegal, but noble. When we got inside the house, it was a celebratory atmosphere. We had liberated a house. People hung out in various corners drinking, smoking, conversing, wondering how long until the cops showed up. Then I saw Drunken Man (not the one in the video game, the real McCoy!). He was in a giddy, fervor. He stood up and led us in a chant, “Take the city, take the city!”
I looked at his face because I thought that the chant was in fun. But I saw conviction on it, not that I thought he believed he could take the city, but I saw the desire in his eyes. Taking the city was a kind of change that he hoped for.
It scared me. It was a slap right across the face of my banal, bourgeois sensibilities and I took a step back. At that moment, I realized I was for taking a house, but not for taking a city. I was okay with the small tilt of opening the shuttered house to a homeless person – taking a thing one “have” was not using and giving it to a “have-not” who needed it; but I was uncomfortable with the larger tilt needed to balance a city or our society as a whole.
My college self had morphed into the kind of person who believed in fighting the good fight, but just in small ways. Inside I harbored a secret I would not even admit to myself - I feared that real change might cost me something I wasn’t prepared to pay. Like, I said, I had become a Moderate.
I learned later that the Drunken Man who was chanting “take the city” was one of the homeless that we entered the house for. Looking back, I think I misinterpreted the look in his eyes. I thought I saw greed. “What? You’re not satisfied with the house, you won’t stop until you have the entire city?” I saw him as a threat to my middle-class life.
But what was really in his eyes was hope, “Hey, you helped me. You took this one house, but what about all the other homeless in the city? What about all the other abandoned properties, sitting idly unused?” Why are you stopping with this small tilt?
Of course, that was a message that took me many more years to understand.
So this is what I have learned from two drunken men. I could be a Moderate. I could believe in things like ‘just the right amount of government’, and a mythical center between the Left and the Right. I could even believe that small changes are noble.
But I couldn't expect to find balance in small changes and little course corrections.
The Art of being a Moderate is learning not to fear the big changes.